Shaping the CRISPR Gene-Editing Debate: Questions About Enhancement and Germline Modification

Today's debate about the use of gene-editing technologies to alter human DNA brings together two longstanding lines of inquiry in bioethics: the ethics of human enhancement, and the ethics of heritable genetic modification. This article traces that lineage by identifying key distinctions and ethics questions in these preexisting lines of inquiry that are also employed in four recent policy and ethics statements on human gene editing. These distinctions and ethics questions can be helpful heuristics for organizing discussion, learning from existing analysis, and highlighting what is at stake with new gene-editing technologies. Yet scientists, policymakers, and others new to the ethics of emerging technologies should also be aware of both the limitations of these distinctions and past challenges in adequately addressing the ethics questions they raise. In particular, the treatment-enhancement distinction and the somatic-germline distinction are not as clear-cut as they might initially appear. More importantly, they cannot be used to definitively differentiate right from wrong uses of the technologies in question.