Duke professor Allen Buchanan was the staff philosopher for President Reagan’s Commission on Medical Ethics, was on the Advisory Council for the National Human Genome Research Institute under President Clinton, and is a fellow of the prestigious Hastings Center. Seven years before Jiankui decided to edit the CCR5 gene in human embryos, Buchanan had supported the concept in his influential book Better Than Human: Suppose we learn that some desirable gene or set of genes already exists, but only in a small number of humans. This is precisely the situation for genes that confer resistance to
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