In the 21st century, developments in biotechnology such as synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and cloning technology have enabled humans to further explore the essence of life and directly intervene in its conception. Emerging technologies, such as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) gene editing, have the potential to greatly improve the quality of human life by reducing the risk of genetic diseases and enhancing overall health conditions. However, these technologies also pose challenges to human rights, including the rights of equality. The challenge is to enjoy the benefits of technological progress while preserving our shared humanity and equality. People should carefully balance technological progress with human rights through rules, awareness, and learning from the past to prevent emerging technologies from dominating our society.
Ethical debate over CRISPR gene editing
In 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that he had successfully edited human genes using CRISPR technology for a pair of twin babies. This explosive news immediately triggered a fierce debate around the world. He Jiankui aimed to give babies natural immunity to HIV through CRISPR technology, which enables precise and targeted DNA modifications. This technology offers new possibilities for humans to prevent and treat genetic diseases, and holds great promise in enhancing human health and improving agricultural practices (Westermann et al., 2021). However, the scientific community, the ethics committee (Savulescu, 2019), and the public generally believed that He’s behavior crossed the line and violated scientific ethics. In the end, He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in prison by the Chinese government for illegal medical practice (BBC, 2019).
While He’s action drew intense criticism, it was not the first instance of CRISPR being used on human embryos. As early as 2016, the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority had officially approved the Francis Crick Institute in London to conduct experiments on CRISPR gene editing technique on human embryos (Stoye, 2016). In this case, the experimental embryos must not be implanted in the uterus and had to be destroyed within two weeks. It is easy to see that the 2016 British experiment also involves serious ethical and human rights issues. Arbitrarily editing embryos and deciding their futures at will likely jeopardizes the current framework of ethics. Nevertheless, the British experiment only caused sporadic concerns about technical safety and regulatory issues at the time, and encountered almost no public resistance.
From the British experiment in 2016 to the He Jiankui incident in 2018, the attitude of society towards CRISPR has changed dramatically. It seems that until the first CRISPR babies were officially born, people had never really faced its ethical issues. Only when people faced the reality of gene-edited babies directly did public opinion quickly turn to opposition.
Posthumanist technological wave and ethical challenges
The limited public apprehension about CRISPR technology is not an isolated case. A survey by the Pew Research Center (Rainie et al., 2022) shows that 30% of US adults support using gene editing in babies to reduce disease risk, an equal 30% oppose the idea, while 39% remain uncertain. The even division between positive and negative views resonates with the global development of the posthumanist movement, an unprecedented trend that attempts to challenge and break through the traditional boundaries of human beings. Whether it is gene-editing, brain-computer interface, or human chip implantation (Latham, 2022), they are gradually blurring the boundaries between humans and machines and changing the essence of human beings. With technological development, humans may actively intervene in their own evolution and existence, which will lead to philosophical thinking about "what is human".
Just like the case of CRISPR babies, the wave of posthumanist technology has broadened the possibilities of the future, but the ethical and social security issues it has caused may be hard for humans to afford. For example, if gene engineering becomes a routine technology, the wealthy class may use this technology to optimize genes, thereby further exacerbating social inequality and undermining social fairness (Braidotti, 2018). As Slavoj Žižek writes in Post Human Desert, “humanity is creating its own god or devil”, and “if something resembling ‘post-humanity’ emerges as a collective fact, our worldview will lose all three of its defining, overlapping subjects: humanity, nature, and divinity” (Žižek, 2023). This shift becomes evident: if life can be precisely manipulated by technology, it will closely resemble a machine made up of flesh, blood, and genes. The oxymoron, and the real danger of this, is that humans in the traditional sense will by definition perish in the post-human world.
New Eugenics and lessons of history
Gene editing and other technologies that modify the human bodies are intended to create more "excellent" human individuals, which echoes Eugenics movement in the last century. Eugenics is “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding”, which was adopted by many governments in the 20th century (Davenport, 1911). Today, gene editing technology enables humans to select germline intentionally, which may “jeopardize the inherent and therefore equal dignity of all human beings and renew eugenics, disguised as the fulfilment of the wish for a better, improved life” (International Bioethics Committee, 2015).
In the 20th century, Nazi Germany used eugenics to support its racist and social Darwinist theories and carried out large-scale ethnic cleansing, forcing millions of Jews and other groups considered "inferior" to be sterilized or directly exterminated (Lifton, 1986). Such historical tragedies warn us that once humans are regarded as objects that can be edited and compared arbitrarily, it will lead to the collapse of the existing value system and catastrophic social consequences. Now, a technological wave, reminiscent of 20th-century eugenics, has arrived. If people maintain their current laissez-faire attitude, humans may fall into the similar tragedy predicted by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine, where technological advancement ultimately leads to a divided humanity and a darker future.
In the ever-changing possibilities available in this age, it is important to remember the purpose of technological progress. The aim of scientific and technological advancement should be improving people's quality of life and protecting their freedom, equality, health, dignity and other basic rights, as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations General Assembly, 1948); in other words, progress need not be for the sake of progress. The advancement of science and technology should uplift the whole of humanity, instead of coming at the expense of compromising human rights
Our response: patience and accountability
In recent years, the development of gene editing has far exceeded the expectations of the academic community (Powell, 2018). Similar to the alarm caused by CRISPR, the development of artificial intelligence has also raised concerns. Faced with the unforeseen risks brought by AI, many scientists and ethicists jointly issued a statement calling for a moratorium on certain giant artificial intelligence experiments (Future of Life Institute, 2023). The same is true in the face of gene editing technologies and the potential revival of eugenics. The key is to remain patient.
Just like AI, the development of gene editing should also go through a careful review and evaluation process. Technologies such as CRISPR should be subject to more rigorous clinical trials to ensure their safety and controllability and avoid technological risks. Additionally, people should be aware of the ethical challenges brought by gene editing. For instance, it is difficult to define the boundaries between gene modifications for treating diseases and those for "enhancing" individual abilities. Today, the values of human society are clearly not well prepared for the post-human era. Even a comparatively smaller issue like AI copyright has caused overwhelming moral debates, not to mention consequential technologies such as gene editing that can completely transform humankind itself. Therefore, before gene editing technologies are fully controllable and the ethical framework is refined, it is more important to remain patient than to blindly advance.
In Homo Deus, historian Yuval Harari predicts that the most likely result of artificial intelligence is a complete split within human society, which is much more serious than class differentiation (Harari, 2015). In the book, biological and computer technologies will jointly lead to a widening gap between those who know how to control those technologies and those who do not, and those who are left behind will face extinction. Today, with the unrestricted development of technologies such as gene editing, this social concern might become a reality. Currently, the decision-making power of gene editing technology is in the hands of a few scientists and government agencies (Blasimme, 2019). As Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis writes in his commentary, this situation can be called Techno-Feudalism (Varoufakis, 2021). Instead of eliminating social inequality, technological advancements such as gene editing may lead to technological elites further “parasitically exploiting working people and traditional capitalists alike” (Hedges, 2025).
Therefore, considering that people are not yet prepared to face such unpredictable technological, ethical, and social risks, similar to the proposal by the Future of Life Institute mentioned above, we call for a pause on gene editing research. During this period, the international community and governments can take the following measures:
1. Establish a global scientific ethics review agency to conduct strict supervision of gene editing technologies.
2. Formulate globally unified technical specifications and strictly define the safety range of relevant gene technologies to prevent different countries from abusing technology due to regulatory differences.
3. Establish standardized and transparent laboratories to prevent individual scientists or small research teams like He Jiankui from conducting high-risk experiments in the absence of supervision and ethical review.
4. Strengthen public awareness education to enhance society's understanding of the long-term risks that gene editing may bring.
For the above measures to be effective, strong international supervision is needed. Since gene editing technologies might decide the future of humankind, it may cause vicious competition among countries, especially in the current context of anti-globalization and great power hegemony (Walter, 2021). In the face of this unprecedented technological crisis, now is not the time for countries to compete with each other. The supervision and regulation of related technologies should not be limited to specific countries, but should become a global consensus.
Today, in the global competition of gene editing technology, different countries are adopting entirely different regulatory strategies, as the data shows. (Genetic Literacy Project, 2024)
Without internationally unified standards and regulations, some countries can try to relax the regulation of gene editing to attract related industries (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017). Facing the huge benefits brought by the technology, geographical restrictions will not be a barrier, and related practitioners will all flock to countries with loose regulations. In this way, the strict supervision and regulations in some countries will become empty talk, leading to the collapse of the entire international regulatory system. Therefore, we need to establish a credible international accountability system to ensure that all gene editing research follows common ethical standards, rather than becoming victims of competition between countries.
In the history of technological development, humans have witnessed the catastrophic consequences of technological uncontrollability many times. The development of nuclear energy, chemical weapons, and biological agents has experienced similar dilemmas, which ultimately forced humans to restrain them through international cooperation. Today, the impact of gene editing may be far more profound than the above technologies, and a global accountability mechanism urgently needs to be established.
Conclusion
The posthumanist technological revolution represented by gene editing promises a better future, but also threatens the essence of humanity. From the moral dilemma of CRISPR babies to the specter of a new eugenics and techno-feudalism, history warns us that unfettered progress can cause catastrophic inequalities and losses. Now, more than ever, we stand at a crossroads: we can either rush headlong into a posthuman abyss or pause for a while to forge a global consensus that safeguards our shared humanity. At the same time, global accountability mechanisms for gene editing technologies are not only urgent, but also essential to ensure that today’s miracles do not become tomorrow’s tragedies.
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