What’s the difference between genetic engineering and eugenics?
By Robert Gebelhoff,
The Washington Post
| 02. 22. 2016
Untitled Document
For a half-century, the ethics of human genetic engineering have been discussed in the abstract. Because the tools to edit DNA didn’t exist, the question was more a thought experiment than a real concern.
Today, though, the conversation has completely changed. There has been a frenzy of excitement around the possibilities of CRISPR-Cas9. The technology, which allows scientists to design proteins that unzip and replace chunks of DNA as they please, makes it possible to edit genes quickly and cheaply. Investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the innovation, which seems to have endless possibilities: making crops more resilient to diseases, designing mosquitoes so they can’t carry malaria — maybe even eliminating diseases among humans by altering the genes we pass on.
Scientists are confident that the technology could one day eliminate genetic disorders in humans. However, the research is still very young, and there are major ethical questions attached to editing human DNA that the emergence of CRISPR makes even more pressing: Wouldn’t editing out inheritable traits from the human population simply amount to eugenics...
Related Articles
By Ryan Cross, Endpoints News | 08.19.2025
Human eggs are incredibly rare cells. The ovary typically produces only 400 mature eggs across a woman’s life. But biologists in George Church’s lab at Harvard University — a group that’s never content with nature’s limits — just got a...
By Riley Beggin and Jeff Stein, The Washington Post | 08.03.2025
The White House does not plan to require health insurers to provide coverage for in vitro fertilization services, two people with knowledge of internal discussions said, even though the idea was one of President Donald Trump’s key campaign pledges.
Last...
By Harry Hunter, PET BioNews | 08.11.2025
The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology has announced plans to publish a POSTnote and called for submissions on surrogacy law in the UK and internationally.
The current UK surrogacy laws, largely based on legislation from the 1980s, have been...
By Staff, National Women's Law Center | 08.13.2025
INTRODUCTION
Baby bonuses. Motherhood medals. Fertility tracking. You may have heard of these policy proposals as solutions from the Trump administration to help encourage women to have more children.
Besides falling short of ensuring that people have what they need...