“Accepting and cherishing the raw material you’ve been given to work with.” What raw material? Sandel’s and Saletan’s discussion focuses on genes—and indeed, gene therapy, gene editing, and genetic selection has preoccupied ethicists, doctors, and philosophers for the last decade. But genes are lifeless without cells. The real “raw material” of the human body is not information, but the way that information is enlivened, decoded, transformed, and integrated—i.e., by cells. “The genomic revolution has induced a kind of moral vertigo,” Sandel writes. But it is the cellular revolution that will
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