I expect to see a great deal of FUD surrounding human genetic editing the future. One gets the sense, reading the commentary from the scientific community follo

I expect to see a great deal of FUD surrounding human genetic editing the future. One gets the sense, reading the commentary from the scientific community following He Jiankui's announcement, that the outrage and condemnation didn't come from any details of the edit, but instead from a certain disgust at the idea that anyone would attempt to edit human genomes at all. While it's true that, in theory, unknown edits could cause novel gains of function, and while it's true in theory that there might be undetected off-target effects, these sorts of outcome are unlikely. Mutating one byte of /bin/ls will almost certainly not transform it into a C compiler. Criticism of He Jiankui's work plays up almost-impossible negative side effects while ignoring the beneficial applications of this technology; it emphasizes the remaining areas of genetic ignorance while ignoring the massive strides in understanding from the past decades; and it suggests that we'll never have sufficient understanding to apply these techniques routinely. That is, it's FUD. Human genetic editing is likely one of the most profoundly beneficial technologies ever developed, and to see its use delayed saddens and disappoints me. If the mainstream scientific community will block the development of this technology, using public condemnation, binding "ethics" panels, and (as I predict will come soon) censorship of research, then the ethical thing to do is to bypass the mainstream scientific community, as He Jiankui did. This work is too important to delay on the account of obsolete, non-utilitarian, and ultimately irrational disgust.