A new age began in November 2018, when the world learned shocking news about the birth of the first gene-edited babies in China. He Jiankui, an unseasoned researcher who performed haphazard and surreptitious experiments on viable human embryos using CRISPR–Cas9, confirmed he had manipulated the CCR5gene, which plays a role in HIV resistance in humans. Calls for bans on such uses of genome-editing technology surfaced immediately. Some critics claim that editing the human germline (a term that refers to sperm, eggs, zygotes, and embryos) is immoral, unethical, and will push society down a dangerous eugenic path. A common concern is that genome-editing technologies are inherently insidious because they will lead to “designer babies” with a panoply of artificial traits, including superior intelligence, athleticism, or even beauty. Uncertainty in this emerging field of law and science is further compounded by the lack of scientific knowledge among the general public and the dearth of international norms in an increasingly globalized world. This chapter dives into the myth of designer babies and explores the dissonance between public opinion and the science of complex human traits. In so doing, it grounds the conversations on scientific facts to elucidate whether intelligence and other complex traits can really be engineered in a test tube.

Distinctively Catholic voices have contributed to public debate over the patenting of human life from its very beginnings (since the Supreme Court’s landmark 1980 Chakrabarty decision). This essay reviews these contributions and assesses them in light of Audrey Chapman’s recent criticism that, in general, religious contributions to the debate over gene patenting have been intermittent, fragmented, and less interested in shaping actual patent law and policy, especially in the US, than in mounting a “prophetic” critique of what are taken to be the various problematic political, social, and economic assumptions undergirding such law and policy. In response to Chapman’s critique, the essay demonstrates how a theologically coherent and ethically rigorous contribution to the public debate over gene patenting–one that is not exclusively “prophetic”–can be discerned in the work of two influential Catholic theologians, Lisa Sowle Cahill and Cathleen Kaveny. Going beyond both Cahill and Kaveny, and in contrast to the widely shared assumptions about divine ownership that underlie their (and most other) theological contributions to this debate, the essay proposes that recapturing the late Herbert McCabe’s point that God literally owns nothing would allow the formulation of a more adequate theological contribution to the bioethical debate over gene patenting.