"Prevention" and Human Gene Editing Governance.

The Holocaust and the racial hygiene doctrine that helped rationalize it still overshadow contemporary debates about using gene editing for disease prevention. In part, this is because can mean 3 different things, which are often conflated. involves modifying the expression of pathogenic DNA variants to forestall their clinical effects in at-risk patients. involves controlling transmission of pathogenic variants between generations to avoid the birth of affected offspring. seeks to improve normal human traits to resist disease. These distinctions have been neglected in human gene editing governance discussions and are clarified in this article.