As bioethics journalist Katelyn Walls Shelton observes, the technology at stake here is not limited to its impact on one child but extends to the heritable traits those children themselves pass on, with “the potential for these edits (or mistakes) to be passed on generationally. They’re not just editing one embryo’s genes; they’re editing the future of the human race. That’s why scientists have long avoided this type of heritable gene editing.”

Imagine going to the doctor’s office with your spouse to learn that your unborn child carries genetic traits likely to cause blindness. The doctor tells you about available gene therapies that can “edit” out the genes causing blindness. Would you take advantage of this technology to spare your child from what is now an unnecessary hardship?

This is no longer just a hypothetical (even if the technology is not yet commercially available). Last week, the New York Times published a blockbuster bioethics story that should prompt all would-be parents to consider what the future of gene editing holds for childbearing.

According to an article based on a just-released research paper, geneticists at Columbia University have used a technology called “base editing” to rewrite a genetic typo in the human genome that can result in hereditary pathologies. This differs from earlier CRISPR technology, which is considered less predictable and riskier: CRISPR allows scientists to “cut out” the defective gene, thereby increasing the risk of chromosomal abnormalities. If CRISPR is like using scissors to remove a defective gene, base editing is like using a pencil to rewrite the gene. This does not result in the chromosomal abnormalities seen in CRISPR, though questions remain—as the article concedes—about the long-term viability, success, and safety of base editing. Even if base editing offers greater technical precision, the moral problems remain. A more effective technology wielded wrongly is still wrong.

The point of this column is not to drop the hammer on the technology entirely. Rather than speaking in terms of clear right and wrong, we should recognize that this technology occupies a morally gray zone. It is in a state of contestation. Stating the differences matters in the moral calculus. Therapeutic intervention differs from genetic enhancement. The former looks to repair or restore a natural function, while the latter looks to redesign the human germline beyond normal function. Base editing enables both. Somatic gene therapy for consenting individuals, for example, differs from interventions imposed on non-consenting embryos and future generations—interventions that will be driven by marketplace incentives.

Some Christians will look at this technology and see the possibility of repair and restoration as morally licit, while other Christians will see it as a Faustian bargain: There is too much that could go wrong for us to use it responsibly (availing ourselves of a technology with few principled limits, irreversible DNA damage, discarded embryos, designer babies, and eugenics). One can think of C.S. Lewis’s warnings in The Abolition of Man that humankind’s conquest of nature would be used against humankind.

Christian ethics recognizes a moral difference between repairing defective genes that cause hereditary diseases and genetic augmentation aimed at optimization. But the line between them is perilously thin because the technology that allows for one is likely the same technology that will enable the other.

But this new technology does open a Pandora’s box, forcing us to consider: How could an ostensibly good use of gene editing to eliminate pathologies not lead to a genetically optimized human population, as though human beings possess the power to override the realities of Genesis 3?

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