Looking at the advancement of technology from stone tools to Higgs boson and Quantum Entanglement, it seems that ego and "progress" driven species will ALWAYS want to take control over genetics. Since this is tens of orders of magnitude more complex than physical science, the ability to affect change will happen centuries if not aeons before enough understanding to do it safely; so all civilizations will wipe themselves out with bio-weapons, intentional or not, before they achieve intra-galactic travel.
My other answer to the Fermi Paradox is that it takes a large number of uncorrelated rare events to get to where we are, and most planets live in a far more hostile environments or had far more normal astronomical evolution.
Mammalian life forms only emerged after ten major extinctions. Life can only exist with liquid water, high energy source, limited range of temperature which means close to star, and yet can't evolve under normal UV and energetic particle radiation - so the planet needs an ozone layer and a molten core with circulation that produces magnetic field. The preponderance of ferro-magnetic elements and the level of radioactive decay to keep the iron liquid (fission sequence from Uranium down) means it is a third generation system, the matter having gone through TWO supernovae, which is uncommon in this young a Universe.
The magnetic field has to reverse from time to time, or at least go to zero, to have periods of stimulated genetic change form the collapse of the radiation belts.
You need a moon of high mass and orbit time to produce an inter-tidal zone and develop terrestrial life.
You need to be in the empty space between the spiral arms of the galaxy to avoid cataclysmic impacts with high energy space junk from outside the solar system, and you need two gas giants to sweep asteroids from the "Goldilocks zone" of distance from the star, and then do a pas-de-deux to outer orbits where they don't disrupt small planets in the zone by their outsized gravitation.
The exo-planet search so far has only addressed the low density of space issue, since all the stars within range to detect planets are close galactic neighbours. We can't extrapolates the frequency of planets here to the rest of the galaxy, which is at least a thousand fold reduction in the Drake calculation, and so forth.