Editing germline cells to make GM humans with better offspring

We Are This Close to "Designer Babies"

On February 1, scientists from the United Kingdom's Francis Crick Institute got the okay to start research on human embryos using a new genome editing technology called CRISPR.

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CRISPR is essentially a cellular scalpel. 

The small enzyme works by moving through the body's cells and cutting away at precise pieces of the genome—something that's never before been possible to do with such efficiency and ease. 

Since 2012, it's been used to cut out the gene mutations leading to HIV and sickle cell anemia. 

Last spring, researchers in China became the first to genetically modify embryos with CRISPR after they used the technology to replace a gene in a single-cell embryo.

The technology can also be used to edit what scientists call germline cells—embryos in such early stages of development that any changes will become hereditary and can be passed on to future generations. 

Using the technique, for example, scientists could potentially edit out the gene for Huntington's disease in a woman before she's born. 

Not only would she be disease free; she wouldn't be able to pass it on to any future children.

Told you they'd sell it this way.

It is simply false that allowing this process means there are or will ever be women who would have been born with the disease, but for the intervention that ensured they were born free of it.

The intervention will be done on embryos that would absolutely not have been allowed to be born at all, without the intervention.

Much less is it true that the intervention means there is or ever will be any woman whose descendants would have carried the disease, but owing to the intervention those same descendants will be free of it.

Had the intervention not occurred neither the woman nor her descendants would ever have existed, at all.

The intervention means that people will be born who would not have been born had it not occurred.

It does not mean than anyone will be better off than he or should would have been had it not occurred, aside from the first set of parents who will be better off only in the sense that they will have a child free of disorder that they otherwise would not have had.