China Honors Mengele Legacy..

I find an announcement from China yesterday to be most concerning…

It was proclaiming a successful effort to create the first children whose DNA had been tailored using gene editing. Apparently Chinese researchers have been recruiting couples in an effort to take fertilized eggs from mothers, genetically alter them in a laboratory, then transfer them back into the womb.

There is evidence the lead doctor has performed genetic tests on fetuses as late as 24 weeks, or six months old. Further, the Associated Press says at least one set of twins in the trial have been born.

If this is true, the world has its first designer babies.

I think it is a most concerning revelation….all to similar to stories that emerged from Germany in the early 1940s when a doctor, Josef Mengele, fed his fascination with human genetics by conducting the kind of experimentation  that make his name synonymous with barbarism. He also was fascinated with twins. His experiments are too ghoulish to speak here….

Look, this is really way beyond my pay grade….but the thought of genetically editing speck-size human embryos is fraught with ethical and moral issues too numerous to capture in a two-minute commentary. But it does shine a light on the differences between the United States, China….and Nazi Germany.

We value life. I understand the desire to eradicate disease in its earliest stages but this is clearly an attempt to play God. And since they don’t believe in God in China, I have to wonder what, if any, barriers have been present as they "Mengele" with human fetuses…..live human fetuses.

Do we really want to make sure all of our kids are 6-2, blonde and blue-eyed? 

Make no mistake….that was Josef Mengele’s goal…