The answer that worries many researchers: you're practicing. You're developing the technical capability to edit normal human embryos, which is exactly what you'd need to do enhancements - making people taller, more intelligent, or more resistant to disease, regardless of whether they had genetic problems to begin with.

Now, I need to be clear about something: there's no strict legal prohibition against this research in the United States. There's been an informal moratorium in academic labs since the 2018 scandal when Chinese researcher He Jiankui created gene-edited babies. But informal norms aren't regulations.

Megan Allyse at Case Western Reserve University questioned how "this particular research study threaded its way through those guardrails," noting uncertainty about institutional oversight. That's a diplomatic way of saying: how did this get approved?

The 2020 international commission on human germline editing outlined conditions for acceptable research: there must be a serious medical need, no reasonable alternatives, and strong evidence of safety and efficacy. This Columbia study arguably fails the first criterion - there was no medical need because the embryos were healthy.

But here's the genuinely difficult ethical question: how do you develop safety and efficacy data without doing experiments? You can't prove that embryo editing is safe for therapeutic use without first demonstrating it works in embryos. But doing those demonstrations is itself ethically fraught.

This is technology that has fundamentally outpaced our ethical frameworks. We have the technical capability to redesign human biology, but we haven't established societal consensus on when, whether, or how that should be done.

The science itself is elegant. Base editing offers unprecedented precision. The researchers were transparent, publishing their work for peer review. But elegance and transparency don't resolve the core question: just because we can do this, should we?

I don't have an answer to that. Neither does the scientific community, which is precisely why this research is so controversial. We're in the uncomfortable position of possessing transformative biotechnology without agreement on its acceptable uses.

The universe doesn't care what we believe. But unlike fusion energy or diabetes drugs, the ethics of human germline editing aren't just about what's scientifically true - they're about what kind of future we want to create, and who gets to decide.