“Science doesn’t move backwards, and we can’t unlearn this knowledge, so we need to find a prudent path forward,” she says, reprising the phrase in the title of the report she wrote after her 2015 Napa Valley meeting. “We’ve never seen anything like this before. We now have the power to control our genetic future, which is awesome and terrifying.

For all of history, humans (and every other species) have been battling rather than accepting nature’s poisoned offerings. Mother Nature has produced massive suffering and distributed it unequally. Thus we devise ways to combat plagues, cure diseases, fix disabilities, and breed better plants, animals, and children.

Our respect for nature and nature’s God should, indeed, instill some humility about meddling with our genes. But should it absolutely forbid it? After all, we Homo sapiens are part of nature, no less so than bacteria and sharks and butterflies. Through its infinite wisdom or blind stumbling, nature has endowed our species with an ability to edit

To what extent does dealing with mood swings, fantasies, delusions, compulsions, mania, and deep depression help spur, in some people, creativity and artistry? Is it harder to be a great artist without having some compulsive or even manic traits? Would you cure your own child from being schizophrenic if you knew that, if you didn’t, he would become

So enhanced height is a positional good, while enhanced resistance to viruses is an absolute good.

The issue is one of the most profound we humans have ever faced. For the first time in the evolution of life on this planet, a species has developed the capacity to edit its own genetic makeup. That offers the potential of wondrous benefits, including the elimination of many deadly diseases and debilitating abnormalities. And it will someday offer

If we could safely edit genes to make our children less susceptible to HIV or coronaviruses, would it be wrong to do so? Or would it be wrong not to do so?

Church’s bio-enthusiasm was given a boost in the popular press by one of his Harvard colleagues, the well-known psychology professor Steven Pinker. “The primary moral goal for today’s bioethics can be summarized in a single sentence,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Boston Globe. “Get out of the way.” He took a brutal swipe at the entire profession of

Focusing mainly on philosophical rather than safety concerns, the authors discussed what it meant to be human, to pursue happiness, to respect nature’s gifts, and to accept the given. It argued the case, or more accurately it preached the case, that going too far to alter what is “natural” was hubristic and endangered our individual essence.