At Asilomar the discussions had been mostly about safety, but Doudna made sure that the Napa conference tackled the moral questions: Did the premium that America put on individual liberty require that decisions about gene-editing of babies be left mainly to parents? To what extent would creating gene-edited babies—and abandoning the idea that our genetic endowments came from a random natural lottery—undermine our sense of moral empathy? Was there a danger in decreasing the diversity of the human species? Or, to frame the question from a more bioliberal perspective: If the technology was
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