There won't be many more gene-edited babies just yet - here's why

THE first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born in 1978. But before she was even born, more than 5000 couples had applied to undergo the procedure. Forty years on, around 8 million children have been conceived using IVF.

Can we expect a similar opening of the floodgates for gene editing, following He Jiankui’s announcement of the birth of the first two babies to have been gene edited as embryos?

Certainly not right away. Gene editing of embryos has the potential to affect many generations. Such “germline” genome editing is illegal…