How Brave New World Is Sneaking Up On Us

Paul Knoepfler is not a scientist given to alarmism, but it’s pretty clear from his informative new book that the Brave New World is already upon us.

GMO Sapiens: the Life-Changing Science of Designer Babies provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art science, and what headline-grabbing breakthroughs we can expect in the very near future, perhaps in less than a year.

Genetically modified human embryos are likely to be implanted and brought to term in the U.K., where three-parent IVF has been approved. This is a limited form of genetic manipulation, aimed to help couples where the mother would pass on certain diseases due to faulty genes in the mitochondria, the cell’s energy centers. In the process, the nucleus of the mother’s egg cell is transferred to replace the nucleus of a donor whose own egg cells contain healthy mitochondria. In this way the couple can avoid passing on the mother’s disease bearing genes.

In China, we may see human embryos modified using the controversial new CRISPR-Cas 9 technology to bring children to term, also...