Good news for prey: Genetic engineering is woefully ill equipped to produce bespoke killers of any kind. That's because building a life-form is a messy and unpredictable process. "It's quite easy to disrupt development and cause problems," says Michael Deem, a bioengineer at Rice University. Often, modified creatures die for reasons that are never identified. That means it's also too early to wield genetic engineering for good-but that hasn't stopped scientists from wading into ethically dubious waters by trying. In China, researchers recently edited the genes of a nonviable human embryo. While targeting the gene responsible for a potentially fatal blood disorder, they triggered a number of unexpected mutations. "They argued that they never intended to take the experiments all the way to a human being," says Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics. "But in fact, these exact experiments are what you have to do to perfect these technologies."
展开▼
