Originally posted by Starlight
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Scientifically, the idea of scientists doing anything in particular to create "better" babies is pretty absurd and is about a billion times more movie than reality. This is because while some really serious genetic conditions can be localized on the genome, and hence knocked out reasonably easily via methods like the one mentioned which replace a whole chromosome with another chromosome, things we would consider potentially "good" traits that a parent might want to have in their child (e.g. intelligence) are not localized within the genome and are massively distributed across the genome so you'd have to be doing individual gene editing on a super massive scale and science is not remotely close to having a good understanding of how such massively distributed traits function or what side effects gene editing on that scale might have if we could even do it. So while scientists might be able to help people with serious genetic disorders have a child that didn't inherent their serious genetic disorder, the idea of someone giving a list of positive traits they want the child to have and scientists making this happen is orders of magnitude different.
Positive gene editing and negative gene editing are both gene editing. You also seem to be forgetting the Luna and Nina controversy surrounding He Jiankui.
Since society one the whole now seems fine with same sex parenting, and fine with surrogates giving birth to implanted eggs, the only potential concern I can see here is around whether the child would suffer any physiological damage by being created via this method. Looking at the science of what they are doing, I can't think of a reason there could be any problem with the offspring. But just because I can't think of a reason, doesn't mean there might not be one, and extensive testing on mice and other animals should be able to tell us that. The paper reported no issues with the mice offspring in their experiment who appeared normal in all respects and went on to have children of their own. But certainly I would want to see further testing of this done, and done in other species, before it was approved for use in humans. Fortunately many animal species have much shorter lifespans than humans so we can see the results of this in multiple generations of multiple animal species in quite a short time period.
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