Where genetic engineering really can do something that embryo selection cannot is in genetic enhancement better known as designer babies. Photograph: Roger Bamber / Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo

Hope for families with genetic conditions, and scientific breakthrough: that is how headlines are proclaiming a project that modified human embryos to remove mutations that cause heart failure. But anyone who has concerns about such research is often subjected to moral blackmail. We are regularly lumped in with religious reactionaries or anti-abortion campaigners.

The medical justification for spending millions on such research is thin: it would be better spent on developing cures

I am neither. If you peel away the hype, the truth is that we already have robust ways of avoiding the birth of children with such conditions, where that is appropriate, through genetic testing of embryos. In fact, the medical justification for spending millions of dollars on such research is extremely thin: it would be much better spent on developing cures for people living with those conditions. Its time we provided some critical scrutiny and stopped parroting the gospel of medical progress at all costs.

Where genetic engineering really can do something that embryo selection cannot is in genetic enhancement better known as designer babies. Unfortunately, thats where its real market will be. We have already seen that dynamic at work with the three-parent IVF technique, developed for very rare mitochondrial genetic conditions. Already, a scientist has created babies that way in Mexico (specifically to avoid US regulations) and a company has been set up with the aim of developing the science of designer babies.

Scientists who started their careers hoping to treat sick people and prevent suffering are now earning millions of dollars creating drugs to enhance cognitive performance or performing cosmetic surgery. We already have consumer eugenics in the US egg donor market, where ordinary working-class women get paid $5,000 for their eggs while tall, beautiful Ivy League students get $50,000. The free market effectively results in eugenics. So its not a matter of the law of unintended consequences or of scaremongering the consequences are completely predictable. The burden of proof should be on those who say it wont happen.

Once you start creating a society in which rich peoples children get biological advantages over other children, basic notions of human equality go out the window. Instead, what you get is social inequality written into DNA. Even using low-tech methods, such as those still used in many Asian countries to select out girls (with the result that the world is short of more than 100 million women), the social consequences of allowing prejudices and competitiveness to control which people get born are horrific.

Most enhancements in current use, such as those in cosmetic surgery, are intended to help people conform to expectations created by sexism, racism and ageism. More subtly, but equally profoundly, once we start designing our children to perform the way we want them to, we are erasing the fundamental ethical difference between consumer commodities and human beings. Again, this is not speculation: there is already an international surrogacy market in which babies are bought and sold. The job of parents is to love children unconditionally, however clever/athletic/superficially beautiful they are; not to write our whims and prejudices into their genes.

Its for these reasons that most industrialised countries have had legal bans against human genetic engineering for the last 30 years. Think about that for a moment: its pretty unusual for societies that normally put technological innovation at the centre of their policies to ban technologies before theyre even feasible. There have to be very good reasons for such an unprecedented step, and its not to do with protecting embryos. Its to do with the social consequences.

Genetically modified crops are a good comparison. Faced with a similarly irresponsible absolutism from the scientific community as well as with the obvious competition for fame and profit the green movement and the left felt they had to take the issue of GM food into their own hands. Now it looks like its time to campaign for a global ban on the genetic engineering of people. We must stop this race for the first GM baby.

Dr David King is a former molecular biologist and founder of Human Genetics Alert, an independent secular watchdog group that supports abortion rights

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Editing the human genome brings us one step closer to consumer eugenics - The Guardian