What they’re saying: There are concerns about the safety and efficacy of editing genes in adults, and editing embryos raises an even bigger ethical concern: The genetic changes and all the unknowns around them can be passed down to future generations.

Patrick David Hsu of the Salk Institute tells Axios, “This is bad, irresponsible science.”

Eric Topol of Scripps Research Translational Institute says: “This was the fear — that someone, someday, would do something before it was ready. … But, for the most part, there was international consensus that we were not ready.”

National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins made it clear on Twitter that he wants to slow it down: “The need for development of binding international consensus on setting limits for this kind of research, now being debated in Hong Kong, has never been more apparent. Without such limits, the world will face the serious risk of a deluge of similarly ill-considered and unethical projects.”