Synthetic blood may be used in human beings as soon as 2017.(Credit: AP Images)

In April 2016, scientists from the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, revealed that they had implanted a chip in the brain of a quadriplegic man.The chip can send signals to a sleeve around the man’s arm, allowing him to pick up a glass of water, swipe a credit card and even play the video game Guitar Hero.Roughly around the same time, Chinese researchers announced they had attempted to genetically alter 213 embryos to make them HIV resistant.Only four of the embryos were successfully changed and all were ultimately destroyed.Moreover, the scientists from the Guangzhou Medical University who did the work said its purpose was solely to test the feasibility of embryo gene editing, rather than to regularly begin altering embryos.Still, Robert Sparrow of Australia’s Monash University Centre for Human Bioethics said that while editing embryos to prevent HIV has an obvious therapeutic purpose, the experiment more broadly would lead to other things.