We can - and should - celebrate another step on the path to understanding mysterious diseases like cancers, schizophrenia, or muscular dystrophy with the complete decoding of the human genome. Strange to me is the thought that having my own genome sequenced would be within my price range at $1,000, as compared to a $3 billion bankruptcy in 2003.
This achievement can indeed be set against the abominable events in Ukraine or the challenge of world poverty in a cost of living crisis. It promises more personalised medicine as well as treatment for previously untreatable diseases.
But scientific discovery has not lost its capacity to pull technology along in its wake and thereby drag ethical choices along too. Treating previously incurable diseases is effectively non-controversial. Yet what happens if campaigns about gender are superseded by hard reality about sex choices, including as a lucrative business? Just suppose a later era Putin could finance its/their war machine with funds from sex and gender manipulations?
Bluntly, any liberal (not to mention existentialist) society will be obliged to allow its members biological choices if such become available, and take the consequences wherever they may lead. Although I shall have no physical descendants, I care enough about the future, if any, of humanity to hope it will not self-destruct because of its present genome. I hope it will prove capable of some wisdom in developing its future genome.