Starting to see all of life, including our own, as increasingly manipulable will force us to think more deeply about what values will guide us as we begin altering biology more aggressively.If we want to avoid dividing our species into genetic have and have-nots—a dangerous reduction in our diversity—or a genetic determinism that undermines our humanity, we’ll need to start living our values.But though we need to be mindful of the dangers, we must also keep in mind that these technologies have the potential to do tremendous good.Someday they might well help us avoid extinction level events like dangerous synthetic pathogens, a warmer climate, the fallout from a nuclear war or the eventual expiration of our sun.The Economist: Do we have the ethical framework to handle this?If not, what might it look like if things go wrong?Mr Metzl: We create beautiful art, philosophy and universal concepts like human rights but wipe out millions of each other in wars and genocides and still today invest massive amounts of our collective wealth in tools of mass murder.