Ethical Questions Loom Over Efforts to Make Human Genome from Scratch

June 1, 2016

(MIT Technology Review) – One concern is that making a human genome could have weighty religious and ethical implications. Although the prospect remains remote, people could in theory be designed on computers and born without parents. Other critics said organizers did an inadequate job of laying out their ties to startups. “Those companies would have a very large profit opportunity; they stand to benefit tremendously,” says Peter Carr, a synthetic biologist at MIT’s Lincoln Lab.