Question: When you said that the embryo development even could affect adult life, is this meant in a way that we could “edit” an embryo to create an organism with certain pre-determined traits?

Paul McKeegan answered on 16 Nov 2017:

Yes, to an extent!
There is some really cool research underway to use CRISPR-Cas9, which you’ve probably seen in the news, to ‘edit’ human embryos to better understand embryo development and disease. So we could feasibly use this technology to ‘edit’ an embryo to replace a disease-causing gene with an unharmful version. The technique is in very early stages at the moment and has a low success rate – but it is improving rapidly!
The other thing to think about is the ethics of this. Removing genes that always cause really harmful diseases like Huntington’s disease is probably a good call. But genes linked to cancer and heart disease often give ‘increased risk’ and so messing about with them might not always be the best idea, or feasible. Then you also have the idea that we could ‘edit’ embryos to give whatever traits people want, which doesn’t sound like a good thing at all. Even when this technology works perfectly, it is ‘invasive’, meaning it causes harm to the embryo, and should only be done when it is of overall benefit to the embryo. We have got excellent ethical laws in the UK, which ensures this sort of research is only done in the best way possible, and in the best interests of the whole country/world. Watch the sci-fi film ‘Gattaca’ for a worst-case scenario!