German doctors want to soften their country's rules on embryo experiments. They make a good case. For the obvious historical reasons, Germany is pretty strict on anything resembling eugenics. That said, it is not clear to me whether it is they or we who should be doing the reassessing.
German genocide guilt is a noble thing, but it's rightly the property of us all. Britain is lucky to have institutions that keep us from that kind of madness, but cut us and we bleed the same as Germans. Indeed the Holocaust is peculiarly horrifying because it was perpetrated by a nation we all thought was at the apogee of civilisation. When the UFOs finally land, one might reasonably hope they land in Germany, so they get a good impression of the human race. If the Germans with all their wonderful music and philosophy, all their hard work and ingenuity, if they can sink into depraved barbarism - what hope is there for the rest of us? And if I can, as I do, feel proud of Beethoven and Kant, then I by golly ought to feel ashamed of Goebbels and Himmler. If Germany can learn moral lessons from remembering the evil of Nazism, so should every other nation of the human race.
Perhaps instead of Germany reassessing its embryology laws, the rest of us ought to be cribbing from their statute book. The German laws have the merit of treating people (or potential people, depending on how you look at it) as ends not means. The idea of treating people as ends not means is a pretty basic one if you want an enduring liberal polity. Funnily enough, it's also the idea of Prussian philosopher.