The title of the gathering was “Engineering the Human Germline,” and it focused on the ethics of making genetic edits that would be inherited. These “germline” edits were fundamentally different, medically and morally, from somatic-cell edits that affect only certain cells in an individual patient. The germline was a red line that scientists had been reluctant to cross. “This is the first gathering where people have talked openly about germline engineering,” Watson said approvingly. “It seems obvious that germline therapy will be much more successful than somatic-cell edits.
