In addition to national legislation, international treaties like the Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (which the UK has not signed) specifically prohibit human germline genetic modification. The easy explanation for this prohibition would be moral aversion to eugenics, the pseudoscience of improving a population’s genetic composition, which was popular in the West in the first half of the twentieth century, before being discredited by the example of the Nazis.
除国家法律外，欧洲理事会《人权和生物医学公约》（英国尚未签署此项公约）等国际条约明文规定禁止对人类生殖细胞进行基因改造。对这项禁令最简单的解释是因优生学所引发的道德厌恶，优生学是一门改善人口基因构成的伪科学，该学科曾于二十世纪上半叶在西方红极一时，后因被纳粹用作理论基础而蒙羞。