Designer Babies and a Brave New Biopolitics

In 2018, the world recoiled when a Chinese scientist announced the birth of the first gene-edited babies. For a brief moment, humanity looked in the mirror and saw what it was becoming. Not a species guided by faith or humility, but one tinkering with its own design. Seven years later, that mirror is back in front of us. And this time, it’s bigger, better funded, and headquartered in Manhattan.

A new startup called Manhattan Genomics has vowed to “end genetic disease” by editing embryos before birth — in other words, to design human beings. Its founders are not mad scientists in lab coats but sleek entrepreneurs fluent in the language of disruption. One of them even compares her venture to the Manhattan Project. The analogy is as revealing as it is disturbing. Both promise to change the world by splitting something sacred — the atom, then, the genome now. (RELATED: Eugenics: The Dark Side of IVF)

To be fair, not all genetic editing is dystopian. In some rare cases, it can be genuinely life-saving. A baby might be born with a deadly mutation that could be corrected in the womb. A family with a long history of inherited disease might finally be freed from fear. In those instances, technology can serve compassion — science working as an extension of mercy.

But that is not what this movement is really about. Manhattan Genomics is not content to heal the sick; it aims to rewrite the human story. It wants to move from curing illness to “optimizing” life itself. And that shift — subtle, seductive, sold in the language of progress — is where the real danger lies. Because once we begin deciding what counts as a “better” human, we are no longer doctors but designers. (RELATED: What C. S. Lewis Can Tell Us About New IVF Eugenics Technology)

We’re told this is about compassion, yet it reeks of control. It is not hard to imagine where it leads: embryos selected not only for health but for height, intelligence, appearance — and, inevitably, for profit. A world where parents become consumers, children become products, and the line between creation and construction disappears. Today’s “disease prevention” becomes tomorrow’s “enhancement,” and before long, morality itself is just another obsolete gene to edit out. (RELATED: ‘Three-Parent’ Human Experiment Becomes the Standard for a New IVF Treatment)

The language of this new era is curiously familiar: “innovation,” “empowerment,” “choice.” It’s the vocabulary of Silicon Valley — soft words masking hard realities. And while the founders insist they’ll be transparent, their track records read more like parables of hubris. One cofounder previously helped launch a project to create glowing rabbits. Now she wants to glow up humanity itself. The symbolism writes itself.

Their pitch to investors sounds philanthropic: we will end suffering. Yet ending suffering has always been the first justification for the worst ideas. The early eugenicists of the twentieth century said much the same thing — that they would “eliminate defects” and “advance mankind.” They used science to rationalize moral blindness. The tools are different now, but the temptation is the same: to play God without permission.

Even some scientists who support embryo research admit that what’s unfolding is a moral free-for-all. In academia, there were guardrails — committees, ethics boards, and some degree of accountability. But startups answer to venture capital, not conscience. When progress is measured by funding rounds and press coverage, the line between “innovation” and “insanity” can blur quickly. Manhattan Genomics isn’t just rewriting genes. It’s also rewriting the rules.

The Christian concern here is not rooted in technophobia, but theology. The belief that life is sacred, that creation has purpose beyond our engineering. Christians, conservatives, and frankly anyone who values sanity should see this for what it is: a rebellion against limits. The story of Eden began with the same impulse — to know more, to control more, to be like God. Now, however, the serpent tempts not with apples but with upgrades.

Yes, there will be moving stories: a child saved from illness, a family spared heartbreak. But those exceptions will be used to justify an industry of genetic vanity. The real market won’t be the sick; it’ll be the scared and the ambitious — the parents who want guarantees, the elites who can afford them. “Healthy” will quietly evolve to mean “enhanced.” And like all luxuries, it will trickle down only in advertising, never in access.

The moral implications are staggering. Once we start treating embryos as editable code, what stops us from debugging the inconvenient — disability, difference, perhaps even temperament? We’ve already seen societies discard the unborn for having the “wrong” chromosome count. Imagine that prejudice with a billion-dollar research lab behind it.

There’s a tragic irony in the company’s name. The original Manhattan Project gave humanity the power to destroy itself in an instant. This one offers the same outcome, only slower and subtler — a creeping corrosion of what it means to be human.

So yes, Christians should care. Conservatives should care. Anyone who believes that life is more than data should care. Because this isn’t science serving humanity, but science rearranging it.

We’re told this is progress. But progress toward what? You can draw your own conclusion. Something tells me it won’t bring much comfort.

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