When I think about the various new ways of manipulating human genetics, I can’t help but feel that there is something profoundly lacking in our appreciation of what it is to cherish humanity. In my native Tibet, the value of a person rests not on physical appearance, not on intellectual or athletic achievement, but on the basic, innate capacity for compassion in all human beings. In regard to his or her value as a human being, it is entirely irrelevant whether an individual has some kind of disability. All human beings have an equal value and an equal potential for goodness. To ground our appreciation of the value of a human being on genetic markup is bound to impoverish humanity, because there is so much more to human beings than their genomes.