If we can edit out a family's cancer, must we?

When an illness runs down a family line, people have always asked whose fault it is. Now they can ask whether it has to keep going. On September 29, NPR took readers inside Origin Genomics, a New York startup testing gene editors on stem cells from embryos donated by families with inherited disease. Making babies from edited embryos is illegal in the U.S., and CEO Cathy Tie hopes her data will help change that. She calls it "unethical to not pursue this research," while critics NPR spoke with warn of "false hope."

Two of the donors are Nicole and Asaf Ezra, a Manhattan couple who want three kids. Nicole's family carries a gene that fills the gut with growths that can turn into cancer, and it reached her grandfather and her mother. She had most of her large intestine removed at 13. IVF gave them one embryo free of the mutation, and they lost that pregnancy. They're still trying. When Asaf heard about Origin, they also invested in it and gave it three of their embryos. "We just don't want to pass on cancer to our kids," Asaf told NPR. "Who would want that, right?"

John's Gospel tells of a man blind from birth, and of Jesus's followers looking at him the way people have long looked at a family illness. In verse 2 they ask who sinned, this man or his parents, because they assume somebody must owe the debt. Jesus answers that nobody does, and in verse 4 he says he must do God's work while it is still day. Then he does it. In verses 6 and 7 he spits on the ground, puts mud on the man's eyes and sends him to wash, and the man comes back seeing.

So the story lifts the blame off the family, and it still doesn't tell us what to do in the lab.

It does press on both easy answers. It takes the bite out of "don't play God," because Jesus plainly treats the blindness as something to work against. And it presses just as hard on the idea that a child with a bad gene is a flaw to fix before birth. The man in John was born blind, and Jesus names him, exactly as he was born, as the place where God's work would show. However far the labs get, some children will still be born with the gene, and they won't be anyone's mistake either.

Who carries the family's burden, then? Right now Nicole does, in surgeries and a lost pregnancy and fear, and John's answer is that she carries it without owing it. Whatever the lab decides, that freedom from blame already belongs to her, and to every child born with the gene or without it.