The geneticist Bentley Glass, in his address on becoming president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1970, argued that the ethical problem was not that people would embrace these new genetic technologies but that they might reject them. “The right that must become paramount is the right of every child to be born with a sound physical and mental constitution,” he said. “No parents will have a right to burden society with a malformed or a mentally incompetent child.”
