Three-Parent Babies and Eugenics

My feed is full of stories about “three-parent babies” and whether they are a eugenic threat. Predictably, Art Caplan, the Neil deGrasse Tyson of bioethics, features prominently. A report on CNN quotes him heavily and he wrote an op-ed that was picked up by several news outlets. Caplan, more diplomatic than nuanced, says the technique could be scary if used to create super-babies, but that currently it is a legitimate, strictly therapeutic medical procedure. This middle ground strikes the right chord of concern while basically supporting the biomedical enterprise. And it misses the point.

The procedure combines “traditional” in vitro fertilization with a technique that substitutes mitochondria from one egg into another. Mitochondria, whose role in the cell, crudely, is to provide the energy to carry out metabolic and other processes, have their own little genomes, and mutations in their DNA can lead to a variety of diseases, including various respiratory conditions and muscular dystrophy. The scenario runs something like this: you are a woman who wants to get pregnant. You spit in a cup and get your genome results...