To try to give it more meaning than it deserves in some quasi-mystical way is for Steven Spielberg or somebody like that. Watson is not alone in his support for germline engineering. But in science circles there is also strong emerging opposition to such experiments, and growing support for regulation. Last month, Eric Lander, a friend of Watson and director of the largest publicly funded genome sequencing center, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called for a ban on human germline gene therapy because of our limited knowledge. We've been able to read it for the last year or so.
Lander acknowledges that there are potential benefits to germline engineering.
There is the prospect that by changing things we might put off aging, prevent cancer, improve memory. The dazzling possibilities, he says, makes it tough to recommend reining in scientists. For my own part, I would have a ban in place, an absolute ban in place on human germline gene therapy. Not because I think for sure we should never cross that threshold, but because I think that is such a fateful threshold to cross that I'd like society to have to rebut that presumption some day, to have to repeal a ban when it thought it was time to ever try something like that. Though Celera's Hamilton Smith and Lander were competitors in the race to complete the mapping of the human genome, they agree on this point.