Gene Editing Must Reckon With the Unforeseen - Facts So Romantic

Almost exactly a year ago, I attended the International Summit of Human Gene Editing at the National Academy of Sciences. It was organized in part by Jennifer Doudna, arguably one of the inventors of Crispr-Cas9. It's a new biotech tool--cheap, easy to use, and reliable--that allows thousands of scientists around the world to modify genes in plants, model organisms, and living human cells. One of the biggest ticket items on the agenda was a debate on editing the germline, the heritable code entailed in sperm and ovum that gets passed on to future generations. One chief concern is that Crispr-Cas9 will open up new terrain for a "market-based eugenics"--genome editing will be combined with in vitro fertilization techniques. There's certainly motivation to explore this landscape: Many mothers with foreknowledge of a newborn's condition of Down's syndrome, for example, choose to abort; if they had the foreknowledge that their child would have autism, or major depression, and if they had the ability to modify genetic markers for intelligence, or psychiatric risk traits, they might be tempted to take advantage of it.