Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Recently, the New York Times reported that scientists at Columbia University are using a new technology called base editing to alter the DNA of early human embryos with unprecedented accuracy.

Here's what the time said, quote,

on the one hand, the technology might one day enable parents to safely repair disease-causing mutations and embryos, but it might also be used to select desired traits, a practice that

some ethicists have argued is nothing short of eugenics, end quote.

Well, these recent approaches differ from earlier gene editing methods like CRISPR,

which removed effective genes, not necessarily improve them.

So what the Times is reporting is not just a difference in degree, but in kind,

though with the same moral questions that still remain unanswered. As Andrew Walker

put it over at World, quote, we should recognize that this technology occupies a morally gray zone.

Therapeutic intervention differs from genetic enhancement. Base editing enables both,

end quote. Well, neither base editing nor CRISPR will be the last foray into this kind of eugenics.

In fact, some of us predicted that the imprisonment by the CCP of a Chinese scientist who used CRISPR a few years ago to modify human embryos was basically a distraction, not really a punishment.

And if that was the case, it definitely worked,

because the public has moved on. The outrage at the doctor has now died down. His work actually

continues, even as Columbia researchers have added a degree of academic respectability to these

efforts to edit human beings. And it always goes like this. As one of the

geneticists from Columbia put it, we need to have a public discussion about gene editing. Really? Do we?

Before or after, we do it. Note these scientists are behaving as if the moral questions are settled,

or at least somehow a matter of personal interest and preference,

and all that's left now is to discuss how best to use the technology. Both history and the

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