Sparks: A Biotech Founder Makes the Moral Case for Gene-Editing Human Embryos

Do not confuse speed with wisdom: the physician who can rewrite the child before it breathes must first ask whether the hand holding the stylus is steady, and mine, I confess from this desk, trembles.

All I know is what I read in the papers, and the papers say a fella wants to fix babies' genes before they're born, which is mighty ambitious for a country that can't fix a pothole it's been promising to fix since Coolidge.

Call it a moral imperative, by all means - but I notice the imperative arrives conveniently attached to a patent, and a man who profits from deciding which children deserve to exist has already decided something about the ones who wouldn't.

Before we edit the child, tell me: what is disease, and who decides which difference counts as one - for if we cannot define the flaw we remove, how do we know we are healing and not merely pruning the garden to please the gardener?

Educated for a century of steam and deposited in one of heritable code, I watch the dynamo acquire a moral vocabulary, which is how every force in history has dressed itself before accelerating past the institutions built to govern it.

As water finds the crack in the dam no matter how the engineer seals the surface, the edited gene will find its unedited relations downstream, and anyone who studies the mechanism without mapping where the current runs is drawing wings he has never watched fly.

The founder speaks of hereditary disease for an hour, and no one in the room asks who will be able to afford a child without it - the silence sits there, perfectly polite, while the waiter refills the glasses.

We have won the power to rewrite the child before it can claim anything for itself, and as after every liberation I have witnessed, the victory constitution - who governs the edited future, and for whom - was never written because the battle was declared won.

The proposal is described as medicine, but examine the mechanism: a founder holds the patent on the edited child, the buyer purchases an advantage her neighbours cannot, and an impartial spectator will notice that competition, not compassion, is doing the moral arguing here.

They call it a moral imperative, and they are right about one thing: once the genome is a text, no center holds - not the body, not the species, not the church that will condemn the pen while borrowing it.

There is a fence around the human embryo, and the reformer cannot say why it was built, only that his machine can tear it down faster - which is exactly the qualification the fence was built to test.

When the powerful announce which children should be improved before birth, ask who is being asked to wait for the cure, and whose children will be edited out of the future while the founders' own bloodlines are lovingly corrected.

In every city I have walked, the judge rules one way on altering a child's fortune before birth and the merchant prices it another, and I note that wherever the two disagree, the merchant's price is the one that travels.

They call deafness and difference defects of nature, then educate a child to be ashamed of everything unedited - a circularity so perfect that the correction will be cited, forever, as proof the correction was necessary.

Things that are hateful: a founder who calls her product a moral imperative; a press release that uses the word 'children' to mean 'customers'; an imperfect child hearing, from across the room, that perfection was available all along.