The ethics issue: Should we edit our children’s genomes? – New Scientist

By Michael Le Page

The thought of shaping future generations to fit some pre-imagined ideal of strength and beauty is one that should make us uncomfortable. Once a fashionable field of enquiry, the study of eugenics remains associated with some of the worst excesses of the 20th century, from forced sterilisation to genocide. The lesson we might be tempted to draw from this is to let nature proceed unchecked, free from human meddling, and embrace the diversity it engenders.

But as ethically comforting as that sounds, deciding to do nothing is a decision in itself. We may like to think of humans as perfect, finished natural products that should not be interfered with, but natures creations are botch jobs, full of mindless mistakes. And evolutions way of getting rid of the worst mistakes is to let children suffer horribly and die young.

In the interests of human well-being, then, should we head back down the slippery slope?

Actually, we already have. In most countries, it is already legal to shape the genomes of our children in various ways, from the abortion of fetuses with Downs syndrome to the screening of embryos during IVF. Last year, the thin end of the wedge got that little bit thicker when the UK gave the go-ahead for what have been called three-parent babies, whose mitochondrial DNA is supplied by a third-party donor.

And now, thanks to the revolutionary genome-editing method known as CRISPR, we can directly edit the main genome of cells. In theory, CRISPR could be used to weed out the hundreds of mutations that make us more likely

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The ethics issue: Should we edit our children's genomes? - New Scientist