We came across this interesting video on Youtube about genetically edited babies and we decided to look more into this topic.

Genetically Edited Babies!

Chinese scientist Prof He Jianku , claims he has helped to make the world’s first genetically edited babies, by altering the embryos DNA. The end result was to protect the babies from contracting HIV, by eliminating a gene called CCR5 to make the girls resistant to HIV virus.

The Good

All this sounds too good to be true. If this works people won’t have to worry about HIV stigma. People have been fired from their job because of HIV. People are denied insurance or health care due to HIV. People lose their chance of a normal life due to HIV. They lose their love ones due to HIV.. The list goes on forever. With this technology, people with HIV may consider to procreate to have a healthy child without HIV.

Why stop at HIV only, scientist can further this field of research and make humans resistance to other deadly diseases. Cold , Ebola , Cancer or Leukemia.

The Bad

For starters many countries in the world do not allow genome editing in human embryos, by Law. It seems pretty obvious as to why. Lets say some weird person decides that people should have six fingers instead of five. How about a human having three legs instead of the usual two legs. That would like freaky.

Another concern was that people may engineer a batch of babies to be female and resistance to all forms of STD so that would grow up to serve in the red light districts.

There is also the fear that the people editing the genes may accidentally edit a wrong gene unnoticed, lets say for example a child was edited accidentally to only have a life span of 30 years. If such a child survives to adulthood and pro-create with a another normal non-gene edited individual, their offspring may also inherit this problematic gene where by their expected life span is only 30 years. How would the normal non-gene edited individual feel when they learn their spouse and offspring can only live for 30 years..