He’s in good company: Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for discovering and harnessing CRISPR, is afraid of the same things.He Jianqui did this to three human female embryos in China in 2018, so the three girls with the engineered mutations that they will pass on to their kids (if they’re allowed to have any) are about four now.(Of course, humans have eliminated or at least severely depleted entire species before—passenger pigeons, bison, eastern elk, wolves—sometimes even on purpose but never with the awareness of the Interconnectedness of All Things that we have now.)These studies are purportedly done to get a better understanding of what makes viruses more dangerous, so in an ideal world, we could prepare for the eventuality of one occurring naturally.Cobb writes that “no group of scientists, apart from geneticists, has ever voluntarily paused their work because they feared the consequences of what they might discover.”But the Asilomar conference didn’t happen because geneticists are more moral than other scientists, Cobb maintains; they were just responding to the fears prevalent at their time."