THE FUTUREIn a segment on Swedish national television, I asked the audience a question that silenced the studio: would you design your own baby if you could?
The reaction was predictable. Most people recoil. The idea sounds like science fiction — or worse, like eugenics. But the technology to edit human embryos already exists. CRISPR-Cas9, the gene-editing tool that won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020, allows scientists to modify DNA with a precision that was unimaginable twenty years ago. We can already screen embryos for hundreds of genetic diseases. The question is no longer whether we can design humans. It is whether we should — and who decides.
This is the question I keep returning to in my work: not what technology can do, but what it reveals about us. When people say they would never design a baby, what they are really saying is: I am not ready to take responsibility for the kind of human I create. But the truth is, we are already making these choices. Every time a parent selects an embryo free of a genetic disease, they are designing a human. Every time a society funds research into gene therapy, it is choosing which traits to preserve and which to eliminate.
The uncomfortable reality is that the line between healing and enhancement is not a line at all. It is a spectrum. And we are already on it.
I do not have a simple answer to whether we should design babies. No one does. But I believe the worst possible response is to refuse to engage with the question — to pretend the technology does not exist, or that someone else will figure out the ethics. The people building these tools are moving at the speed of venture capital. The people governing them are moving at the speed of committee meetings. That gap is where the danger lives.
Every generation faces a question that defines its moral character. For ours, it is this: now that we can shape what humans become, what will we choose? And who will be allowed to choose?