Gene Editing Breakthrough: How Far Are We From Fixing And Designing Babies?

How far is our society from genetically modifying people like Microsoft Word documents? A recent publication in Nature described the way a team of scientists used the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system to cut out a heart disease-causing mutation from the MYBPC3 gene in early stage human embryos and then paste in a normal version of the genetic sequence. This is yet another example of scientists editing the genes of human embryos after researchers in China first reported similar success for a different mutation in 2015.