In December, after He Jiankui’s alleged experiment with human genome-editing, a Nature editorial said:

It has not yet been independently confirmed that the Chinese genome-editing researcher He Jiankui altered the DNA of embryos using a gene-editing technique and then implanted them in a woman, as he claims. Such a step would be significant and controversial because it would make a permanent change to the germ line that could be passed on to future generations. (This distinguishes germline editing from the use of gene-editing tools as therapies that correct genetic alterations in somatic cells in blood and other tissues.)

I think that this passage, like a lot of other discourse among scientists on this topic, fails to acknowledge, or at least emphasise, the real damage in this case.

When we insist on the germline–soma distinction as The Barrier for genome editing, and crossing The Barrier as the primary problem, we prioritise The Barrier over the actual people involved. The damage is not primarily to ‘the genome’, ‘the gene pool’, or ‘future generations’, but to the children born of the procedure, and their parents. The genome, on the other hand, is fine. It’s being fuzzed by random mutation every generation anyways.

Imagine this was instead a somatic gene ‘therapy’ experiment, with similarly vague potential benefits against similarly unknown and unchecked potential harms. Would it be fine? Of course not. It might be slightly less bad, because the women wouldn’t have to worry that their children would inherit the potential complications. That the variants are (may be) heritable is not unimportant, but it shouldn’t be the main concern.