Today's debate about the use of gene-editing technologies to alter human DNA brings together two longstanding lines of inquiry in bioethics: the ethics of human enhancement, and the ethics of heritable genetic modification. This article traces that lineage by identifying key distinctions and ethics questions in these preexisting lines of inquiry that are also employed in four recent policy and ethics statements on human gene editing. These distinctions and ethics questions can be helpful heuristics for organizing discussion, learning from existing analysis, and highlighting what is at stake with new gene-editing technologies. Yet scientists, policymakers, and others new to the ethics of emerging technologies should also be aware of both the limitations of these distinctions and past challenges in adequately addressing the ethics questions they raise. In particular, the treatment-enhancement distinction and the somatic-germline distinction are not as clear-cut as they might initially appear. More importantly, they cannot be used to definitively differentiate right from wrong uses of the technologies in question.

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塑造 CRISPR 基因编辑辩论：关于增强和种系修饰的问题

今天关于使用基因编辑技术改变人类 DNA 的辩论汇集了生物伦理学中两个长期的研究方向：人类增强的伦理学和可遗传基因改造的伦理学。本文通过识别这些先前存在的调查线索中的关键区别和伦理问题来追溯这一谱系，这些调查线索也用于最近关于人类基因编辑的四项政策和伦理声明。这些区别和伦理问题对于组织讨论、从现有分析中学习以及突出新基因编辑技术的利害关系是有用的启发式方法。然而科学家、政策制定者、和其他对新兴技术伦理不熟悉的人也应该意识到这些区别的局限性和过去在充分解决它们提出的伦理问题方面的挑战。特别是，治疗-增强区别和体细胞-种系区别并不像最初看起来那么明确。更重要的是，它们不能用于明确区分所讨论技术的正确使用和错误使用。