9 Assessing the He Experiment

In this chapter I analyze (or, more accurately, criticize) the He experiment. I stand by the comments I made to the press just after the news broke: the experiment was "criminally reckless" as well as "grossly premature, and deeply unethical."1 The little we've learned since then has only strengthened my views. This was an unethical, and terrifying, experiment and would have been even if it were not human germline genome editing. But it was, which made it even worse.