Should We Use Gene Editing to Create Super Babies?

February 17, 2025

A young couple wants to have a baby, but they’re worried it’ll carry a disease that runs in the family. “There’s a solution,” the doctor says, “a technology that can alter the disease-causing gene in the egg, ensuring that the baby is born healthy.”

“How about giving our child blue eyes and musical talent?” the parents ask. “I think I can help you,” the doctor says.

Such a conversation once belonged only in the realm of science fiction. But with advances in gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR, fiction might become reality. In 2018, a doctor in China announced that he’d used CRISPR to edit twin girls’ DNA to protect them against the AIDS virus.

But not everyone thinks the world is ready for all the implications of tinkering with human genes. For instance, who’d get to decide which traits should be changed? And aren’t the traits we’re born with part of who we are? In a recent Pew Research Center study, about half of Americans agreed that it was “meddling with nature” and “a line we should not cross.”

So should we edit genes to create “better” babies? An embryologist and a sociologist square off on the question.

I am an embryologist, but I’m first and foremost the father of two young adults. Like all of us, my daughter and son are shaped by the 3 billion base pairs of DNA they carry in every cell in their body, but this does not define them. Rather, their strengths and weaknesses are formed by their instincts, their interests, and the community that surrounds them. I wouldn’t change a single thing about them.

While some might see gene editing as a chance to make “better” babies, I see it as using new genetic tools to correct mutations, or errors in genes, that cause human suffering.

Where I work, health care professionals treat people from across the Pacific Northwest who come to us with devastating diseases caused by a single mutation coded in their DNA. Many of these patients worry about passing these conditions on to their children.

There are thousands of such heritable diseases affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world. These include Huntington’s, an incurable brain disease, certain breast cancers, and a chronic heart condition—hypertrophic cardiomyopathy—that affects an estimated 1 in 500 people and can lead to sudden death.

New gene editing tools could help prevent heritable diseases.

Tools like CRISPR and newer developments in gene editing hold enormous promise for the prevention and treatment of inherited disease. My lab is exploring the possibility of using tools like these to correct mutations in a single-cell embryo, an egg just after it has been fertilized. By doing this, we may prevent disease before it copies itself again and again in the trillions of cells that will form a human body.

Combined with in vitro fertilization (IVF)—where an egg is fertilized outside of the body—these tools offer hope to families making decisions about their children’s health and well-being. As a scientist and as a father,
I am compelled to help them.

—SHOUKHRAT MITALIPOV
Oregon Health & Science University

Imagine a future in which fertility clinics advertise genetic upgrades for babies conceived in their labs. Would rich people get the “best” genomes? Would society divide into genetic haves and have-nots?

That’s where we could be headed if we use gene editing tools like CRISPR on human embryos, eggs, or sperm. Heritable genome editing, which would change the traits of future children and generations, is unsafe and unnecessary, and it could vastly increase already dire levels of inequality.

Let’s start with the dangers. Splicing genes with CRISPR can sometimes cut the wrong stretch of DNA and damage the whole chromosome, which can lead to disease—exactly what splicing was supposed to prevent. And after taking this risk, parents may not get the results they want for their child. As life experience shows us, complex traits such as IQ or talent—traits gene editing is supposed to enhance—come down to far more than genes. It’s doubtful that a fertility clinic could simply engineer a superbaby.

That may not stop some labs from trying—or wealthy parents from shelling out big bucks. Parents, teachers, and coaches might assume that these altered children’s supposed advantages are genetic rather than an extension of their wealth and privilege. If we start believing some people are biologically better than others, we fall into the false promise of eugenics, the idea that improving humanity requires controlling reproduction rather than improving society.

Heritable gene editing is unsafe and could increase inequality.

Some people hope gene editing will provide a way of preventing heritable diseases in children. But we already have ways for families to do that, such as using donated eggs or sperm, or embryos created through IVF that’ve been tested to ensure they won’t inherit the disease.

Genetic treatments for existing patients are improving; new gene therapies can nearly cure sickle cell disease, for example. Even there, price tags in the millions remain a barrier to many people. Let’s improve gene editing to help more sick babies and adults get better—and stay away from eugenic attempts to make “better” babies.

—KATIE HASSON
Center for Genetics and Society