Prevention certainly is better than cure, but the question is: at what risk? I simply accept that on the earliest stages of human life there is a space for conscience; we will have different beliefs, some of which will be religious, and it is a matter of conscience. There are noble reasons for disagreeing about that stage and about what is and is not legitimate risk taking with human beings.
The second point I wish to make is that in the course of this conversation there seems to have been what, at best, I could describe as “semantic sophistry” as to whether or not this process is genetic modification. As always, there is space for debate about the definition of terms, but the germ line is to be modified if these techniques go ahead. The Minister has stated that plainly—