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At 3:30 p.m. on a Friday, Cathy Tie sat in Carnegie Hall, wearing a pink sweatsuit bedazzled with cherries, eating a gyro. Tonight was her 30th-birthday party. She\u2019d had a bad year. So she rented out Zankel Hall, which, it turns out, is a thing you can do: Call Carnegie, get the rate sheet, send money. Done.\u00a0Zankel is graciously wood-paneled with only slight vibrations rumbling up from the Seventh Avenue subway, and it was very empty. In the house seats: just Tie, Tie\u2019s friends Peter and Michael, who would be playing piano and singing some opera; Tie\u2019s videographer; Tie\u2019s page-turner; and Tie\u2019s piano teacher, who had her hair messily clipped on top of her head and a way of pressing her fingers into your arm that made your whole self relax. That evening, as the program stated, Tie would perform \u201cPiano Concerto No. 2 in G minor by Camille \u00adSaint-Sa\u00ebns, bringing both technical rigor and expressive nuance.\u201d Guests would be invited to \u201csing \u2018HAPPY BIRTHDAY\u2019 TO CATHY!\u201d The dress code: black tie. At the bottom of the program was the double- helix-inflected logo for Origin Genomics, Tie\u2019s newest company. Its stated goal is to gene-edit embryos to prevent inherited disease.<\/p>\n
Tie is very tall, with\u00a0perfect skin and a poker face. Sometimes she stonewalls; sometimes she\u2019s very direct. She is slightly pigeon-toed. \u201cI\u2019m going to change into my gown so I get used to it,\u201d she told me. \u201cYou can meet me in my dressing room.\u201d<\/p>\n
The room had a sign on the door that read \u201cCathy Tie.\u201d Inside was an upright piano and the videographer, who shot music videos for the Weeknd.\u00a0A caped, sequined Jenny Packham ensemble lay on the couch. \u201cIs this your dress?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cGown,\u201d Tie corrected.<\/p>\n
Tie went into the bathroom to change. Kate Middleton wore the same gown to a James Bond premiere. Tie\u2019s gown was Champagne pink instead of gold. Tie wasn\u2019t nervous, just tired, she said. Her last year had been a lot. It started with several trips to China, where she\u2019d been born, though not raised. She wanted to explore her roots, she said. She wanted to eat Peking duck. She wanted to know how an authoritarian government approached the genomics industry. While there, she happened to fall in love with He Jiankui, a Chinese scientist who made himself infamous in 2018, when he revealed that not only had he gene-edited embryos \u2014 he\u2019d implanted those embryos in women. This resulted in three babies (who have been kept out of the public eye) and three years for He in prison.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne thing led to another,\u201d Tie told a reporter from the Free Press of her relationship with He. They held a 12-person wedding, which Tie\u2019s family did not attend. The MIT Technology Review labeled Tie the \u201cBride of \u2018China\u2019s Frankenstein.\u2019\u2009\u201d He started tweeting things like \u201cGood morning bitches. How many embryos have you gene edited today?\u201d<\/p>\n
That was April 2025. The next month, Tie packed up her Los Angeles apartment and boarded a flight back to Beijing. On a layover in Manila, airport officials informed Tie that China would not let her reenter the country. \u201cI think that it\u2019s ridiculous how a few months ago, people in the U.S. would say I am a CCP spy and people in China would say I\u2019m a CIA spy. I\u2019m actually Canadian,\u201d Tie said two days later, still in Manilla. \u201cI don\u2019t have any other citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tie\u2019s relationship ended. (Tie later clarified she and He never legally married.) She flew home to the Toronto suburb where she grew up and her parents still live. She felt unmoored. \u201cMy stuff\u201d \u2014 really nice things, she noted \u2014 \u201cwas scattered across the world. I was just with two suitcases and my dog. I\u202ffelt so anxious and confused.\u201d She lived out of hotels and spent whole days at her piano teacher\u2019s house. \u201cMusic became something I needed,\u201d she said. In early August 2025, she announced a new venture: Manhattan Project. \u201cTackling the future $Trillion dollar germline gene correction industry,\u201d Tie wrote again on X. \u201cImagine billions of people born without inherited disease.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tie undertook a personal rebrand a few weeks later. She cued up Lizzo\u2019s song \u201cPink\u201d \u2014 \u201cWhen I wake up, in my own pink world\u202f\u2026\u201d \u2014 and with the help of the -Weeknd\u2019s videographer, she made her own Barbie video: Tie, in pink sleep mask, stretching in bed; Tie waving awkwardly to neighbors; Tie reading a newspaper with the headline \u201cBiotech Barbie Banned.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thus the bedazzled pink tracksuit and caped pink Jenny Packham gown. Tie is just a little surprised no one noticed the link with her Manhattan Project \u2014 that she\u2019s Barbenheimer.<\/p>\n
On the evening before the birthday party, Tie again took the stage, this time in the very tasteful brownstone on the Upper East Side where the Hastings Center for Bioethics was holding its annual debate. The event was billed as \u201cThe Embryo Frontier: Editing Human Life.\u201d On the fight card: Tie, who had dropped out of college at age 18 after winning a Thiel Fellowship, and I. Glenn Cohen, deputy dean of Harvard Law School. Tie wore a black cape.<\/p>\n
Both Cohen and Tie got off some nice lines.<\/p>\n
COHEN: Shouldn\u2019t society view children as \u201cpeople rather than products\u201d?
TIE [pushing back against Cohen\u2019s argument that we need widespread public debate before proceeding]: The right standard is not consensus; it\u2019s legitimacy.<\/p>\n
When the first babies were born through IVF, she noted, the public found the technology mystifying and heretical. \u201cPeople are tired of waiting for progress.\u201d<\/p>\n
Attendees had published white papers on the issue, hand-wringing about eugenics and \u201coff-target\u201d effects, and nothing much had changed since 2015. The gene-editing tools existed. Clinical trials for embryo editing remained illegal. Fear (or, one could say, prudence) dictated public policy. Why unleash into the human population altered genes that could be passed down through generations when, during the IVF process, you could just select for embryos that did not carry serious heritable disease?<\/p>\n
Toward the end, at Tie\u2019s request, the moderator invited to the podium a couple who had been trying for three years to conceive a child who did not inherit its mother\u2019s rare, incurable illness. Nobody wants a sick kid. \u201cI know my mother wouldn\u2019t have passed it on \u2026 my grandfather wouldn\u2019t have passed it on,\u201d the woman said. The family disease would stop with her. Had embryo editing been an option, \u201cWe would by now have our first child. We\u2019d probably be on to the second.\u201d Didn\u2019t families like theirs deserve this technology? Yes, there were risks. But what about the costs?<\/p>\n
Over a post-debate dinner at Cafe Commerce, Tie told me she started questioning academic authority at age 15, when a teacher punished her for missing class to win a science fair. En route to the bathroom, Tie ran into a friend \u2014 or really, a former adviser to Manhattan Project, which had folded after just a few months. Before asking for her lamb chops to go, Tie pulled out of her purse \u2014 and gave to the adviser \u2014 two tickets to Carnegie Hall. Could he make it to her birthday party the following night?<\/p>\n
Some came in long gowns. Some wore double-helix pins on their lapels. Tie had brought in a youth orchestra from Toronto to accompany her. The girls all wrapped pink ribbons around their violin necks or wore pink ribbons in their hair.<\/p>\n
Before Tie performed, Peter Westcott, an assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where Tie serves on the board, sat down at the Steinway and played Rachmaninoff\u2019s Prelude in E-flat major. You could feel the storms go through him. You could feel his elation to be playing in Carnegie Hall.<\/p>\n
Tie performed last. She walked out \u2014 a little awkwardly in her heels \u2014 and arranged her pink cape behind the piano bench. Her hands moved fast with the program-promised technical rigor. Her face remained very still. She bowed when she finished. The orchestra played \u201cHappy Birthday.\u201d This was a remarkable thing to give oneself. Still, you wanted her to look happier. You wanted her to more obviously enjoy what the Thiel fellows in the room would call a supremely \u201chigh-agency\u201d move.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s very brave, very confident,\u201d Tie\u2019s piano teacher told me at the reception, amid the platters stacked with martini glasses and the cater-waiters passing stuffed mushrooms and chicken souvlaki. \u201cRelax. I tell her to relax. Connect your brain to your heart. You make music, you do not have heart \u2014 this is not real music. Just bang, bang, bang.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tie\u2019s parents did not attend the party, though she had seen them a few days before.\u00a0 She\u2019d made \u201cdecisions they don\u2019t understand,\u201d Tie explained, \u201cworking on a technology that can be viewed as so controversial, moving around so much,\u201d particularly to China, which they\u2019d work so hard to leave. \u201cThey\u2019re still catching up.\u201d<\/p>\n
The following Monday, I met Tie at her lab near her home in the neighborhood she requested I not mention \u201cfor privacy and security reasons.\u201d She met me in the building\u2019s lobby, just as I was about to ask the security for her by name. We rode the elevator up several floors and sat in a small, glass-fronted meeting room she\u2019d booked. Beyond the windows you could see lab benches \u2014 beakers, chemical sinks, nitrogen spigots. \u201cWhat happens out there?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo my lab is actually on the other side of the floor, private lab space. It\u2019s where we do our biology and embryology work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Can we go see it?<\/p>\n
No.<\/p>\n
Tie\u2019s plan for Origin Genomics is \u201cto integrate into the existing IVF ecosystem.\u201d The business is in \u201ca pre-regulatory phase,\u201d meaning it\u2019s not yet legal. She\u2019s raised some money (though she won\u2019t say how much). She does not yet have approval from the Institutional Review Board to proceed with research.<\/p>\n
Why keep returning to China? Why marry a gene-editing outlaw? What had she learned from this? Tie did not really want to discuss. Nor did Tie want to talk seriously about Los Angeles Project and her former co-founder Josie Zayner, a geneticist with a punk aesthetic, who once injected muscle-building DNA in her own body before a live audience and who for a time sold mail-order CRISPR kits. Zayner viewed gene-altering an arena for body autonomy. Los Angeles Project\u2019s goal was to make fantastical \u00adanimals like unicorns and glow-in-the-dark rabbits. Tie was \u201creally inspired,\u201d she said, by \u201cdifferent applications of gene editing from both an academic and industry perspective.\u201d She liked playing with the bunnies in the lab. Plus, she said, \u201cFrankly, I did want to build a unicorn.\u201d (Zayner now runs the company, without Tie, under the name the Embryo Corporation.)<\/p>\n
A 30-year-old woman with a reproductive-health startup. I wanted to be on her side. The dominant player in embryo editing, a start-up called Preventive, is funded by Sam Altman and Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong. Armstrong has talked about building \u201cthe Gattaca stack\u201d \u2014 a set of tools to release baby-making from the limits of the human body: lab-grown gametes, screened embryos, artificial wombs. The company will likely run clinical trials outside the U.S., maybe in the UAE.<\/p>\n
Tie feels misunderstood. \u201cIt\u2019s very difficult for people to make sense of a young woman who can play piano at Carnegie Hall, who can debate the deputy dean of Harvard Law and work on science that is so controversial and, you know, start multiple companies. She has to be a spy or something. She must be this or she must be that.\u201d<\/p>\n
What she is, she claims, is something far more familiar: a young woman who felt deadened by her own success. Before the ill-advised marriage, before the unicorns, she made good on her Thiel fellowship and founded Ranomics,\u00a0a biotech company that provides protein and cell-engineering services based on genetic analysis. \u201cI felt very dull,\u201d she told me. \u201cI wanted a certain type of life. I wanted to seize the day, and somehow I ended up running a telehealth platform.\u201d So she decided to transform herself into someone her teenage self would be proud of. \u201cAnd then I got myself in all this trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the May 18, 2026, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n