Scientists heave a collective sigh when they hear the phrase “designer babies”. The words conjure up an elite race of children whose genes have been customised with methods that are as technically implausible as they are ethically fraught.
This is not what most experts fear. The real risk is that one of these days, in a fertility clinic beyond the intense scrutiny that attends every step of embryo research in most western countries, doctors will quietly slice an inherited disease out of a few embryos’ genomes and nine months later announce the birth of the world’s first gene-edited baby.
We know this because we have been here before. Last year John Zhang, a US doctor, used a different but scarcely less controversial technique known as mitochondrial replacement to create a “three-parent” baby in Mexico.
The global scientific establishment was appalled, particularly as the UK was still putting the finishing touches to a pioneering system for licensing this kind of experiment after more than a decade of thorough debate.
The trouble is that no matter how carefully we try to control the science, there will always be places where even the best-laid laws cannot reach. There is not much that experts can do to hold back their colleagues if they are determined to defy international convention, particularly if they are prepared to do so in countries whose regulations are vaguer or more permissive than those in Britain and the US.
Advertisement
This is true not only of gene editing but also of many ethical frontiers that are being challenged by the breakneck pace of biological discovery.
Sandy Starr, of the Progress Educational Trust, a biomedical charity, said the technology needed to be considered alongside projects such as the creation of animals that contain human cells and the generation of sperm and eggs in a dish.
“All of these are potentially exciting areas of research,” he said. “They all require careful regulation, and they certainly require the widest public and international debate before we consider permitting any clinical applications.
“Of course it’s always possible that someone unscrupulous will jump the gun, go jurisdiction-shopping, and travel somewhere to use an experimental medical technique in an unethical way. Even if they do, and even if they evade legal judgment, we can still subject them to our own moral judgment and find them wanting. Indeed, it becomes all the more important for us to do so.”