Published June 18, 2026
To the Editor:
Re “Breakthrough in Embryonic Editing Stirs Debate” (front page, June 6):
This article rightly raises one bioethical concern with embryonic gene editing: eugenics. However, it fails to mention the much broader, perhaps more perilous, concern of many scientists: the potential to permanently alter human genes for generations.
There’s a reason scientists have agreed not to open what some call a Pandora’s box and why at least one scientist in China was jailed for doing so.
When scientists alter embryos at the germline level (reproductive cells), all changes are heritable, meaning they can be passed on to future generations. While germline gene editing could enable therapeutic interventions to persist for future unborn children, it could also permit devastating, irreversible, off-target mutations to persist generationally, too.
Can you imagine, say, being blind because a doctor in a lab altered your great-grandmother’s genes 100 years ago? Or errors in gene editing causing untreatable diseases, childhood cancers or vulnerabilities to new infections in all descendants? The international moratorium on this type of research was the fruit of scientific humility and prudence. Pandora’s box needn’t be inevitable.
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Katelyn Walls Shelton is a Visiting Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Bioethics, Technology and Human Flourishing Program. She is a women’s health policy expert and, as a 2025-2026 recipient of the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship, is conducting a year-long research project on reproductive biotechnology and human nature.
