Many people refer to any effort to work with genetics and nature as "playing God." These people however have nothing to say about man driving one half the nature's species into extinction or burning the Amazon. This hypocrisy has gone on for long enough.
If man can destroy, then man can create. And yet the destructive potentials are taken for granted, while constructive potentials are suspected and attacked. This creates the worst possible scenario in which man is nothing but a destroyer, and nature is nothing but something to be destroyed. There is no outcry from such people about this destruction; but when creation happens, all hell breaks loose.
This results in the worst things for nature and the worst things for humanity. If man can cause the world's fastest ever extinction, then man has the right to create and to produce. From creating cures to genetic diseases, to creating artificial forests and farmland through irrigation with desalinated ocean water, to producing artificial bacteria to eat materials such as plastics, the creating, constructive potential of humanity must be vitalized to solve man-made and natural problems. At which point man stops being only a blind destroyer and becomes an intelligent creator. That's not playing God. That's being the best of man.