In the article by John Harris he mentions that people inherently think of embryo modification as being unnatural and that we as humans are playing God when we make gene modifications. I believe that people think this until they are in a situation faced with making a choice of having a child, knowing that it will have some horrible lifelong disease. We don’t understand that we’ve been modifying ourselves for quite some time now, but issues arise when it’s an unborn child that has no say in the matter. Current generations always have to make choices for the future generations, mainly because they are not around to make them for themselves. Also, we are not afforded the luxury of time in most situations to wait and see. Diseases have been developing side by side with humans, and if we waited around for a natural way to solve them, we might all be dead.
Gene editing is a very difficult idea to fully grasp. I believe it’s so exciting to people because it might be a beacon of hope for some people, while others would use it to gain unfair advantages. I agree with the articles that we need to be careful as we proceed with CRISPR technology. I do believe that technology like this won’t just disappear. It will allow us to possibly rid the world of extremely harmful diseases. I do believe that before gene editing should be allowed to be used by the public that we begin by editing the genes of animals first. We might be able to witness some of the unintended consequences that arise from gene editing and correct these mistakes before we begin altering the DNA of humans. The articles mention that with technology like this that we can’t afford to wait. I believe we do need to wait, because there is still so much about what might happen that we just do not know yet.