Scientists Are About to Decide When to Stop Editing the Perfect Human

• Now that human genome editing is real, the ethical questions are endless.

• A three-day summit in London in March will focus on the ethical quandaries of gene editing in pursuit of the perfect human.

• The science of genome editing is moving faster than any regulations around it.

One of the first talks at the planned Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing in March is called, “Hopes and fears for human genome editing.” The panel is scheduled to last just 90 minutes—almost certainly not enough time to set the tone for a three-day event focusing on the ethical questions surrounding the pursuit of the perfect human.
In the most recent summit, which occurred in 2018 in Beijing, a scientist named He Jiankui shocked the world by unveiling he altered the genetics of three girls when they were just embryos. He was jailed by the Chinese government for three years for his unethical practices, but since that time, the technology of genome editing has only progressed. (In 2020, scientists were awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for creating “genetic scissors: a tool for rewriting the code of life.”)
“Genome editing has enormous power to benefit people,” Robin Lovell-Badge, organizer of the London event, tells The Guardian, “but we should be transparent about how it is being tried and tested before the technology is put into practice.”
Scientists Are About to Decide When to Stop Editing the Perfect Human