Designing the Next Generation: Designer Babies
- Crystal Kong
- Nov 30, 2025
- 2 min read
What’s the difference between CRISPR Gene editing for treating disease and enhancement? How can designer babies create genetic inequality?
By Crystal Kong and Chloe Cherng, High School Students
On May 15, 2025, a historic medical breakthrough took place: the first infant to receive successful gene therapy. An infant, who was diagnosed with carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, was treated with a customized therapy using the gene-editing platform CRISPR. By correcting a specific gene mutation in the baby’s liver cells, CRISPR emerges as an advanced gene-editing technology that enables precise changes to DNA inside living cells. (NIH, 2025).
This development raises many ethical concerns, categorized into 4 broad areas: concerns about eugenics, health risks to children, allegations of failure of professional self-regulation, and a “chilling effect” on scientific research (Knoppers, 2019). In this blog, we will cover ethical concerns about eugenics and health risks.
Eugenics
The rise of gene-editing traits deemed undesirable in an individual evokes concerns about eugenics. Eugenics is defined as the idea of selectively improving humans based on desired traits. The most well-known application of eugenics occurred in Nazi Germany in the lead-up to World War II and the Holocaust. The Nazis attempted to “cleanse” the German people by euthanizing those deemed as “unworthy of life;” this includes the LGBTQ+ community, marginalized groups, and disabled individuals. According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, this process of sterilization claimed the lives of at least 400,000 victims. Although recent applications of gene editing have been used as a treatment for diseases, further development of gene editing could eventually resemble past abuses: defining certain traits as “undesirable,” social pressure to engineer “better” children, and inequalities between modified and unmodified individuals.
To add on, giving parents control over their future child’s biology threatens genetic diversity and can amplify discrimination. Society will favor certain traits over others, putting pressure on an ideal image of the “perfect” human, and CRISPR gene-editing will enable children to fit into these toxic expectations.
Health Risk to Children
The second major ethical issue raised by CRISPR technology is the unknown medical risks. The relative modernity of this technology poses many potential dangers that scientists are not yet sure of. For example, gene editing may unintentionally create off-target mutations, and expose modified children to unknown long-term effects and unknown heritable changes for their descendants. In addition, some argue that gene editing is unethical because children cannot give informed consent.
Conclusion
The milestone of saving an infant using CRISPR gene-editing directs us towards a path of compassionate medical innovation but also risks inequality, genetic stratification, and ethical uncertainty. This crossroad reminds us that though this may be a turning point in disease prevention, we must proceed with caution.
References
Eugenics and scientific racism. Genome.gov. (n.d.). https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Eugenics-and-Scientific-Racism
Knoppers, B. M., & Kleiderman, E. (2019, January 28). “Crispr babies”: What does this mean for Science and Canada?CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association journal = journal de l’Association medicale canadienne. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6342697/
World’s first patient treated with personalized CRISPR gene editing therapy at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia | Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia . (2025, May 15). https://www.chop.edu/news/worlds-first-patient-treated-personalized-crispr-gene-editing-therapy-childrens-hospital
Comments