Recent events highlight an unpleasant scientific practice: ethics dumping

THE ANNOUNCEMENT in November of the editing of the genomes of two embryos that are now baby girls, by He Jiankui, a Chinese DNA-sequencing expert--brought much righteous, and rightful, condemnation. But it also brought a lot of tut-tutting from the outside world about how this sort of thing was to be expected in a place like China, where regulations, whatever they may say on paper, are laxly enforced. Dig deeper, though, and what happened starts to look more intriguing than just the story of a l...