Mr. Jiankui would have been less confusing. Editors should be able to identify issues like this and adjust the writing to avoid confusion IMHO.
He is his family name, Jiankui is his first name. That'd be like calling Dennis Ritchie "Mr. Dennis" throughout an article.
[Corrected, I confused my Oriental honorifics.]
To be honest, if you are not intimately familiar with what names tend to be family names and what names tend to be first name in a given culture, you're just hopelessly boned in English media unless they explicitly call it out for you in the article, because sometimes they leave the names in the Oriental ordering, and sometimes they "conveniently" switch them around for you without saying so. (Statistically speaking, I have to imagine there have been cases where the writer switched it to the English order, and then another writer or the editor switched it again, returning to the Oriental order without realizing it....) The end result is, I suggest everyone cut the English-speakers significant slack on this front when they read an article, because even understanding how names work in the East is still not enough to prevent errors.
Mainly I wanted to emphasise that "first name" is often used in Western culture to mean "given name" but they're not synonymous and using the term "first name" confuses the situation.
first name = given name = forename = personal name; family name = last name = surname
But you're right that for cross-cultural clarity I should have used "given name" instead of "first name", I just have real trouble remembering that term (english is not my mother tongue, and my mother tongue is much more prescriptive about these terms).
And given the author I'm ambivalent, I'd be surprised if they had not considered it, though I guess it might be a blind spot.
Edit: it looks the parent comment was edited after I posted this, and said something along the lines of "I wish articles used the researcher's actual name instead of He or She".