There’s a recent Economist article on the advent of CRISPR technology which is a gene editing tool that could be used (at some indeterminate point in the future) to allow parents to design their offspring. Don’t want your kid to have your bad breath? Edit it out with CRISPR. Wan’t your kid to excel at music in a way you never did? Bring on the CRISPR.

The catch is that a lot of attributes interact in ways we don’t understand. It’s possible that making someone too intellectual limits their emotional life or that making someone too empathetic could paralyze them with anxiety*. The article points out an interesting fear, that parents intent on improving their kids could actually damage them.

* These are examples I just made up; I have no idea if they are real.

If CRISPR can be shown to be safe in humans, mechanisms will also be needed to grapple with consent and equality. Gene editing raises the spectre of parents making choices that are not obviously in the best interests of their children. Deaf parents may prefer their offspring to be deaf too, say; pushy parents might want to boost their children’s intelligence at all costs, even if doing so affects their personalities in other ways.

And let’s not forget the elephant in the room.

…if it becomes possible to tweak genes to make children smarter, should that option really be limited to the rich?