Meet Cathy Tie, Bride of “China’s Frankenstein”

In April, the feed started to change even more drastically.

He’s posts became increasingly provocative, with better English and a unique sensibility reflecting online culture. “Stop asking for cat girls. I’m trying to cure disease,” the account posted on April 15. Two days later, it followed up: “I literally went to prison for this shit.”

This shift coincided with the development of his romance with Tie. Tie told us she has visited China three times this year, including a three-week stint in April when she and He got married after a whirlwind romance. She bought him a silver wedding ring made up of intertwined DNA strands.

The odd behavior on He’s X feed and the sudden marriage have left followers wondering if they are watching a love story, a new kind of business venture, or performance art. It might be all three.

A wedding photo posted by Tie on the Chinese social media platform Rednote shows the couple sitting at a table in a banquet hall, with a small number of guests. MIT Technology Review has been able to identify several people who attended: Cai Xilei, He’s criminal attorney; Liu Haiyan, an investor and former business partner of He; and Darren Zhu, an artist and Thiel fellow who is making a “speculative” documentary about the biophysicist that will blur the boundaries of fiction and reality.

In the phone interview, Tie declined to say if she and He are legally married. She also confirmed she celebrated a wedding less than one year ago with someone else in California, in July of 2024, but said they broke up after a few months; she also declined to describe the legal status of that marriage. In the phone call, Tie emphasized that her relationship with He is genuine: “I wouldn’t marry him if I wasn’t in love with him.”

An up-and-comer

Years before Tie got into a relationship with He, she was getting plenty of attention in her own right.She became a Thiel fellow in 2015, when she was just 18. That program, started by the billionaire Peter Thiel, gave her a grant of $100,000 to drop out of the University of Toronto and start a gene testing company, Ranomics.

Soon, she began appearing on the entrepreneur circuit as a “wunderkind” who was featured on a Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2018 and presented as an up-and-coming venture capitalist on CNN that same year. In 2020, she started her second company, Locke Bio, which focuses on online telemedicine.