A Chinese doctor publicly announced two human births where, presumably at the once-cell stage and prior to placement in a donor mother’s womb, he had done a CRISPR modification to enhance resistance to (something – I forget what.)
He was in the news for a while, but now has disappeared, maybe to a bad place and possibly to a gene lab where he will try to improve the offspring of high party officials. Your guess is better than mine, because I don’t care.
But the use of the term Mutant is about as rational as saying the moon is green cheese. EVERY SINGLE HUMAN EVER BORN has a tiny handful of miscopies which make his/her three billion DNA codons dissimilar to his 1.5 billion from mother and 1.5 billion from father.
((NOTE: ironically, with boys the Y chromosome has way fewer codons than the X, which means among other things that mom’s DNA is 51% to dad’s 49% when the child is male. Girls get 50-50 since dad give them an X. OH I FORGOT!!! Mom’s mitochondrial DNA is there, too. There are tales of some male mitochondrions hitch-hiking inside the sperm, but if it’s real it’s also rare. And even then, they came from his mother not his father.))
Gene editing is terrifying and fraught with ethical issues. But its first applications will be to eradicate Tay-Sachs disease, and a boatload of other genetic “problems” which end a child’s life early. And that’s just the first wave.
And, “Right” to reproduce? Let me introduce you to #metoo, NARAL, ACLU, and surely a couple dozen other groups which defend a woman’s right to end her pregnancy and also defend her right to achieve one. Please don’t pretend that someone must climb to heaven then sit on GOD’s throne to ride herd on the subject. Of course it deserves attention – – but only on the doers, not the done-to.
Oh, and Another Thing 