The Download: gene-edited babies, and cleaning up copper

The news: A West Coast biotech entrepreneur says he’s secured $30 million to form a public-benefit company to study how to safely create genetically edited babies, marking the largest known investment into the taboo technology.  

How they’re doing it: The new company, called Preventive, is being formed to research so-called “heritable genome editing,” in which the DNA of embryos would be modified by correcting harmful mutations or installing beneficial genes. The goal would be to prevent…