In November 2018, the same year Films from the Future was published, Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that he had edited the genomes of twin girls using CRISPR-Cas9 — creating the first known genetically modified human beings. The announcement sent shockwaves through the scientific community and turned the book's careful discussion of "could we, should we" from a thought exercise into breaking news.
The book explored genetic engineering extensively through Jurassic Park and Inferno, and the Genetic Engineering page covered CRISPR-Cas9 as a revolutionary tool. But He Jiankui's experiment crossed a line that had been treated as a firm boundary: making heritable changes to the human germline — modifications that would be passed to future generations.
He was widely condemned, imprisoned, and the experiment was deemed reckless by virtually the entire scientific establishment. The girls' identities have been protected, and the long-term effects of the editing are unknown. But the experiment proved something that could not be unproven: it is technically possible to edit a human embryo and bring it to term.
Since then, the focus has shifted to a different and in some ways more consequential development: embryo selection using preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) combined with whole-genome sequencing. This does not involve editing genes — it involves reading them and choosing which embryos to implant during IVF. Companies now offer polygenic risk scoring for embryos, estimating statistical probabilities for traits like height, intelligence, and disease risk based on combinations of hundreds or thousands of genetic variants.
The distinction matters. Gene editing rewrites DNA. Embryo selection chooses among existing genetic combinations. But the destination may be similar — a world where parents increasingly select their children's genetic characteristics. And because embryo selection works within existing IVF frameworks and does not involve the perceived risks of gene editing, it faces far fewer regulatory barriers.
This is one of the purest expressions of the book's central question: Could we? Should we? The technology exists. The demand exists. The ethical frameworks lag behind.
The informed consent problem is uniquely acute. The person most affected by these decisions — the child who will be born — cannot consent. Parents make choices on behalf of future people who have no voice in the matter. And the choices are not reversible: heritable edits propagate through all subsequent generations.
The line between preventing disease and designing people is not bright, and it is moving. Few would object to screening embryos for Tay-Sachs or Huntington's disease. More would hesitate at selecting for lower risk of depression or higher predicted intelligence. But the technology does not enforce this distinction — it simply provides information, and what parents do with it is a social question, not a technical one.
The book's Human Dignity framework — explored most powerfully through Never Let Me Go — asks what happens when we treat human beings as things to be optimized. And the Role of Scientists framework asks what responsibilities researchers bear when their work makes such choices possible. See also Should we let parents choose their children's genes?