5 terrible illnesses that genetic engineering could eliminate forever

The dangers of editing the human genome are well known. The significance of changing small aspects of people, tweaking them to our liking, means that even a mostly fruitless attempt to edit human embryos sparked widespread criticism - and fear that designer babies could be right around the corner.

But the potential to use these same technologies to cure intractable diseases is huge.

In a 2015 essay for the New England Journal of Medicine, Eric S. Lander, the founding director of the Broad Institute and a professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT, clearly expresses the importance of not being hasty or foolish as this transformative research moves forward.

"We should exercise great caution," he writes. But he notes that while more discussion and regulation is necessary before these tools become a free-for-all, "genome editing also holds great therapeutic promise."

Specifically, he mentions five diseases that could be completely eliminated with gene-editing technology (once that technology becomes much more accurate and reliable than it is today):