There is nothing smug about it. It isn't about some abstract ideology. It is a very practical concern and this tendency to focus on shiny tech negatively impacted initial response to the current global pandemic.

The initial response to the current pandemic was for a lot of groups to do things like work on developing open source ventilators, which I felt was a bad idea and the wrong approach and I expressed my concerns at the time about it. It eventually became clear that people with Covid-19 were poorly served by ventilators.

If everyone had remained stuck on "Let's just provide ventilators," this pandemic could have been even worse than it was. Fixation on shiny tech as a medical solution is a very serious problem with practical real world consequences that directly impacts availability of viable treatment for patients.

I'm not sure what your point is. Yes, diet and lifestyle are important for a whole host of health reasons. No-one disagrees with that. And yes, some people said things about ventilators at the start of the pandemic which now appear dumb.

Neither of those apply here. Conflating research into gene editing technologies to fix previously unsolvable medical problems with a 'fixation on shiny tech' and implying that this research is just flashy headline grabbing, is insulting to people who suffer every day as a result of these conditions and stand to gain considerable quality of life improvements if this research ultimately leads to new treatments in humans.