Designer babies? Not again!

Preface: I had just put the finishing touches to this post and I was doing the washing up, when I heard on the six o’clock news that the paper I’ll talk about below has now been published in Nature. I’ll still publish this post though. It would be great to compare the pre-paper news coverage with the …

Designer babies: Are we reaching the end of the slippery slope?

A decade and a half ago Ruth Deech, then Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, said: “The public do not like, and we do not like the idea of designer babies” (quoted in The Independent, 18 October, 2000). That same year, John Harris, Sir David Alliance Professor of Bioethics at the University of …