By Jon Holmlund

A brief recap of reasons why we should not pursue heritable human gene editing:

It seems unlikely that risks to immediately-treated generations can be predicted with the accuracy we currently and reasonably expect from human subject research and medical practice.

Risks to later generations, that is, to the descendants of edited people, would be incalculable, and the informed consent of those later generations would be unobtainable.

To allow heritable gene editing even in the uncommon cases of untreatable, devastating genetic illness is to place too much faith in the ability of human providence to identify, and human behavior to observe, firm boundaries on its eventual use.

Eventual use will become unavoidably subject to a eugenic approach in which the key decision will be what sort of people do we want, what sort of people should be allowed to receive life.

There will be no end to the disagreement over what edits should be permitted, and to the vilification of those considered to have been illegitimately edited, from those who object to their existence, perceived unfair advantage, or other characteristic.

Human populations will become stratified into the “edited” and the natural, introducing deep new justice concerns. The main issue will be not will humans be gene-edited, but what should be the social status of those who are.

To reduce heritable human gene editing to a reliable practice requires submitting it to the paradigm of manufacturing, as in drug development, with children seen as quality-controlled products of choice, not gifts of procreation. To develop the practice, a “translational model,” again analogous to drug development, is necessary, with human embryos serving as raw materials, and, of necessity, a large, indeterminate number created and destroyed solely for development purposes, for the benefit of other humans yet to be born, and of those who would raise them.

Quite possibly, the translational model will demand great license on the extent to which embryos and fetuses may be experimented on; to wit, longer and longer gestations, followed by abortion of later and later stage, to further verify the success of the editing process.

In the extreme situation, the degree of editing may change the human organism in ways that will create a “successor” species to homo sapiens whose nature and desirability cannot be reasonably envisioned at this time. In the extreme situation.

Even granting that this last scenario may never really arrive in ways that fiction writers can easily imagine, the other reasons should be enough that we simply don’t move heritable gene editing forward.

National Public Radio recently reported on the gene editing of human embryos—one day old—in the laboratory, in an attempt to correct and eliminate the inherited cause of blindness, retinitis pigmentosa. The end is laudable. The means is not. We should not race ahead without considering why, first. Then, we should not move ahead, but seek alternate means to the medical ends.

Edited embryos should not be created and brought to term—certainly not now, and I would say, not ever. To be outraged over the former but not the laboratory creation of edited embryos is insufficient. Both are outrages, although outrage over the recently-claimed birthing of edited babies in China is real, not “faux,” as one reaction held. Still, the authors of that reaction are correct that one’s condemnation of the China event somehow justifies the laboratory work. It does not. One last point: The Economist carried an essay decrying the birth of the edited twins in China as a case of “ethical dumping,” the practice of carrying out human subject research that would be disallowed in the West in other, perhaps less advanced (although China is certainly not backward), nations with fewer ethical scruples. A valid point—but not one to cloak oneself in, while trying to justify the efforts to edit humans in ways that can be passed on from generation to generation.