Frankly, no. Buildings are burning with people dying inside right now. The situation is an emergency, even if all we've ever managed is ten millennia of triage. That is the default, that is the background. Weigh the risks, sure, but don't act like choosing to do nothing is without cost. We should study asbestos just as much as we need to, as best as we can tell, and no more. In the meantime we need to fireproof all buildings with asbestos.

Edit: /s (If that wasn't obvious.)

We did weigh the risks. We did study asbestos. And we as a society made an informed decision that the risk of asbestos outweighed the risk of buildings catching on fire.

I don't understand the point you were trying to make here. Why shouldn't we invest effort to research a technology that might mitigate the 2nd leading cause of death in the developed world?

People are talking about prevention vs treatment of cancer, yet, asbestos was a cause of cancer, so by eliminating it, we eliminated a vector of cancer. That's preventative. We as humans, have become so "smart" with all of the things we can create that while not truly understanding the long term effects. We know we've screwed ourselves in the past (even fairly recently) with our cleverness, yet we continue to be surprised when it happens again.

Modifying the source code of humans is like the new hire thinking they can make the code so much faster because they don't know how the section code they are working on is used by the larger system as a whole. All they see is that there's an apparent bug in the section they are viewing now. Never mind the sections of code that have programmed workarounds for that specific bug, and will now break downstream because the buggy returns are no longer present. So how do we know if these kinds of workarounds in the human genome are also not present?

> Modifying the source code of humans is like the new hire thinking they can make the code so much faster because they don't know how the section code they are working on is used by the larger system as a whole. All they see is that there's an apparent bug in the section they are viewing now. Never mind the sections of code that have programmed workarounds for that specific bug, and will now break downstream because the buggy returns are no longer present. So how do we know if these kinds of workarounds in the human genome are also not present?

We know for a fact the current code base is full of bugs and convoluted workarounds due to the original coder having no idea what they were doing. While we may not yet know the best way to refactor the code, it undoubtedly needs to be refactored.