Our Assembly-Line Future?

Human civilization has taken an important turn with the publication of a new report by the Nuffield Council, the semi-official bioethics agency of the United Kingdom. The document, two years in preparation, gives the go-ahead to genetically engineer human beings at the embryonic stages of development. The report stated: “There is potential for heritable genome editing interventions to be used at some point in the future in assisted human reproduction, as a means for people to secure certain characteristics in their children.” If history is a guide, the U.S. will not lag far behind the U.K. in following this dangerous path.

The U.K. pioneered human genetic engineering by approving, earlier this year, a technique to construct embryos using parts of the eggs of two different women, along with a man’s sperm, to create “three-person embryos.” Though deceptively promoted as “mitochondrial transfer,” the procedure really involves transferring around 20 thousand genes from a woman with impaired mitochondria into another woman’s egg. The accurate “three-person” designation was only widely used in the scientific literature after the procedure became legal. Similar misrepresentations of...