Perfecting or selecting? When ‘kinds of children’ are the objective

With news of the birth of the world’s first babies following embryo gene editing breaking in November 2018, transhumanist aspirations to biotechnologically augment human capacities seem that much closer to reality. In this commentary, I argue that recent and ongoing biotechnological developments in reproductive and genetic science notwithstanding, we will do well to self-administer sharp doses of humility if we are pitting human ingenuity against the complexities of the human genome and gene regulation. Selective reproduction today remains almost entirely a matter of ‘selecting out’, ‘discarding’ and ‘terminating’ rather than of ‘designing’ or ‘perfecting’.