Imagine a technology powerful enough to fight off cancer without chemotherapy. Suppose it could also make people especially immune—or vulnerable—to deadly viruses like Ebola. The technology might prevent a child from experiencing a devastating inheritable disease—and also allow the wealthy to design babies with high IQs, blond hair, and blue eyes.
These are the hopes and fears sparked by the freshly honed techniques of gene editing. As scientists have gained the extraordinary ability to change the genetic sequences that encode human cells, they have ignited a fierce ethical debate in recent months about how far we should go in engineering ourselves and the common gene pool of humanity.
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