He Jiankui
Credit: Mark Schiefelbein/AP

When a Chinese researcher claimed to have created the world’s first gene-edited babies, he traversed a boundary many people in medicine had long feared would be crossed.

Thanks to the proliferation and fast-falling cost of new genetic technology, that one day scientists would alter the DNA of an unborn person was increasingly inevitable. He Jiankui, a U.S.-educated scientist based in Shenzhen, said that he had used the gene-editing tool known as Crispr to tailor the genes of twin girls born this month to make them resistant to HIV.

The propulsive pace of technological development has put genetic science on a crash course with seemingly intractable problems of medical ethics, the desirability of designer babies, overlapping regulatory regimes and the long-term implications of tinkering with fundamental building blocks of human life.

“The ability to use some of these new technologies is becoming more ubiquitous and it doesn’t take as much sophistication,’’ said Food and Drug Administration head Scott Gottlieb in an interview with Bloomberg. “You can be a Ph.D. and have your […]