Any potential value to be found in this new base-editing technology will be outweighed by the consequences of not recognizing what is true of the human condition, both our value and our potential for evil. In this case as well, the potential consequences far outweigh the potential benefits.

Recently, the New York Times reported that scientists at Columbia University have used a new technology called “base editing” to alter the DNA of early human embryos with unprecedented accuracy.

As the Times noted,

On the one hand, the technology might one day enable parents to safely repair disease-causing mutations in embryos. But it might also be used to select desired traits—a practice that some ethicists have argued is nothing short of eugenics.

These recent approaches differ from earlier gene-editing methods like CRISPR, which remove defective genes rather than improve them. So, what the Times has reported is not just a difference in degree, but in kind, though with the same moral questions still unanswered. As Andrew Walker said at WORLD, “We should recognize that this technology occupies a morally gray zone…Therapeutic intervention differs from genetic enhancement…Base editing enables both.”

Neither base editing nor CRISPR will be the last foray into this kind of eugenics. In fact, some of us predicted that the imprisonment by the CCP of a Chinese scientist who used CRISPR to modify human embryos was more of a distraction than a punishment. If so, it worked. The public has moved on. The outrage at Dr. He has died down. His work continues, even as Columbia researchers add a degree of academic respectability to the efforts to edit human beings.

And it always goes like this. As one of the geneticists from Columbia put it, we need a public “discussion” about gene editing. Do we? Before or after we do it? No, these scientists behave as if the moral questions are settled, or at least a matter of personal interest, and all that’s left is to discuss how best to use this technology.

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