Gene-Edited Humans Are an Official Reality: Malpractice or Miracle?

Gene-edited humans have officially become a medical reality, as gene therapies technologically succeed and financial support grows substantially.

First Steps: KJ Muldoon, the first infant to undergo gene-editing therapy, took his first steps in December. The one-year-old was diagnosed in Aug. 2024 with severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 (CPS1) – a rare disease that is reportedly fatal to about half of babies in the first week after birth. Doctors Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas and Kiran Musunuru used a new technology, CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), to create a custom therapy that modified Muldoon's genes as treatment for the metabolic disease. Musunuru said in May, "The promise of gene therapy that we've heard about for decades is coming to fruition, and it's going to utterly transform the way we approach medicine."

Financial Backing: Billionaire-funded startup companies are "pushing the boundaries of reproductive genetics," reported The Wall Street Journal (Center bias) in November. One of these startups, Preventive PBC, is funded by powerful businessmen such as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. "Gene-editing technologies now in use for treatment after birth allow scientists to cut, edit and insert DNA," the outlet wrote. "Editing genes in embryos with the intention of creating babies from them is banned in the US and many countries," but Preventive reportedly plans to experiment with embryonic editing in a country where it's legal, such as the United Arab Emirates. Preventive Co-founder Lucas Harrington stated, "Our focus is exclusively on laboratory research to evaluate the safety of these technologies, and we are not involved in any application with human patients."

Eugenics Concerns: The Journal reported, "Some [startups] say they can also give parents the ability to choose embryos that will have higher IQs and preferred traits such as height and eye color." Nucleus Genomics Founder Kian Sadeghi said, "We believe as a business that embryonic selection, genetic optimization, is not for the few, but for everyone." Such statements prompted Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) to send a letter to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in December, which aimed to ensure that Preventive is abiding by proper government regulations. Cornyn expressed concern that gene therapy could lead to eugenics and embryonic destruction. "Gene therapy technology has the potential to open doors to life-changing and life-saving measures," he wrote. "However, these types of therapies must be differentiated from embryonic gene editing." Cornyn emphasized the risks of eugenics through "designer children" and asserted, "Efforts to improve embryos will also lead to the impulse to destroy embryos, human life, who do not possess the full measure of these preferred traits."

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