4 Ethics Discussions of CRISPR'd Babies before He

People have been talking about human germline genome modification for decades, though without necessarily using those words. More than 15 years ago, I reviewed two books about changing a human's DNA in ways that would get into the eggs or sperm and possibly be passed down to future generations,1 but even then, the debate had been raging for decades. This chapter looks at those discussions up to the disclosure of He's experiment, in two parts: the early discussions of recombinant DNA technology, notably at the famous Asilomar Conference, and the more focused discussions after the development of CRISPR as a genome editing system. Along the way, it takes a look at some of the people, "CRISPR people," although not "CRISPR'd people," who were involved.