>We should not proceed down this road until we know far more about the consequences of what we are doing. In the present climate of pessimism it's worth reminding ourselves that we never know all the consequences of what we're doing. The 'Precautionary Principle' kills people too; it merely does so in a less obvious way. Personally I think we should be going hell for leather in identifying and eliminating genetic dis…
This is a particularly bad example to make that case over, as it is hard to discern any scientific or medical justification for it, while the known risks are considerable. Frankly, it looks to me like a posterity-grabbing stunt - an attempt by the researcher to write himself into the history books.
But I don't agree at all with the sentiment. Most/all current gene editing is about fixing known issues, and in nearly all cases (at the moment) it seems like the edited gene, even if it goes disastrously wrong, would still be superior to the "natural" gene. E.g. MVD, MS, ...
Should we also outlaw (and enforce) that people with known genetic defects produce babies the "natural" way ? How about people where we don't know what exactly is wrong, but clearly something is wrong (e.g. very small, bone disease, large family incidence of leukemia, ...). There's some justification for that as making those babies produces a LOT of terrible suffering, but aside from the moral problems it seems very impractical to do this as well.
A LOT of "suboptimal" humans are produced, a LOT of humans are born with a body that just ... won't work in certain ways or will die in painful ways in a decade or less. Mostly in cases where the odds of a better outcome than the parents had is zero (meaning the terrible outcome was testable beforehand or even predictable).
So I would argue there is plenty of reason to give people access altered babies. Perhaps there are indeed some bridges not to be crossed, but I would argue that we should probably still cross them a few times to see first.
That will suck badly for a few babies, but not doing it has sucked for ~0.5% of humanity for all of history (that's about the incidence of genetic defects that kill on average before adulthood, all taken together).
That means this year alone half a million babies will be born with genes so defective they will never grow up (but the vast majority of them will gain enough intelligence to make the inevitable suffering really bad before they die)
That's not counting serious defects, like Down syndrome, that won't kill but have incredibly bad consequences nevertheless. Nor is it counting people born with disabilities that will survive (e.g. blind, deaf, paralyzed (ouch), deformed, ...)
I feel like that makes it reasonable to say that we should do nothing until we have something like 10000 edited babies born. Hopefully at that point we will know what works, actually have some data, and know what doesn't work and perhaps cut that half a million figure in half or better.
That won't change the number of people who are screwed by their genes meaningfully. In fact, it ought to make it possible to lower that number by a LOT.
This is one of those cases where "doing nothing" is not the morally neutral option. Doing nothing is accepting the status quo as good enough. The status quo is that worldwide, something like 20 million children are on death row due to bad genes. 5 US states worth of children. Most of them are children with no real outward sign of any problem, who will just die, relatively suddenly (meaning from "going to school and playing" to dead takes months, no more).