What are the risks of genetically engineering a baby?
How can you do a ‘case study’ when nobody has yet even attempted to engineer a human genome, never mind done so successfully? In any case, you will need to be more specific, since there are many degrees of ‘genetic engineering’. This can mean anything from ‘genetic therapy’, where copies of a healthy gene are introduced into the body of a patient with a genetic disease (e.g. cystic fibrosis); to ‘germline engineering’, where (a) heritable modification(s) is made to the chromosomes themselves. As far as I know, this has not yet been attempted on humans–and such experimentation is likely to be illegal in most western coutnries. Germline modification is extremely tricky, since one must identify a specific target sequence (e.g. a ‘faulty’ gene which causes disease), excise it (and it alone) from all cells in the organism, and replace the excised sections with a ‘healthy’ gene. Doing so successfully (i.e. without ‘collateral damage’) is statistically very unlikely, and failure will likely
