The end of diseases, designer babies, and genetically modified humans that never age. These things used to be science fiction, something we could only imagine, but they are suddenly becoming our new reality. CRISPR/Cas 9 may be the answer we’ve all been looking for.
CRISPR, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, is a futuristic technology that can edit genes in our DNA. This is both impressive and overwhelming, because on one hand: we are having a medical breakthrough, on the other: we are getting into an unnatural future of genetically modified humans.
CRISPR is getting a lot of attention in the science world because it might be our cure to cancer, HIV, blindness, muscular dystrophy and many other diseases. Not to mention the whole editing humans part. This system works by using the enzyme, Cas9, and a guide RNA that is designed to locate and bind to specific sequences in the DNA. The guide RNA will only bind to it’s target sequence. The enzyme follows the guide to the same location of the DNA and makes a cut in the DNA. The cell will then recognize the DNA has been damaged and it works to repair it. I’ve attached this video to make it easier to understand:
I hope that helped. I encourage you to branch out and do your own research on CRISPR and develop your own opinion of it. I am amazed by this technology, I’m amazed that one day we might be able to make mosquitos that don’t transmit malaria, I’m amazed we could modify an embryo to be exactly what we want it to be, and we could possibly reduce the number of miscarriages by genetic engineering and fighting against diseases before they start.
I only fear this will lead to people not practicing healthy behaviors because this system could insert high metabolism genes. I fear people living forever, the system is said to have a way to reverse aging effects. And I fear that people who can’t afford this will be the ones missing out, the “normal” ones. Either way, the world as we know it is about to change forever.
Resources:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a19067/11-crazy-things-we-can-do-with-crispr-cas9/
https://www.addgene.org/crispr/guide/
http://www.yourgenome.org/facts/what-is-crispr-cas9
Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZImVkl8QTW8
History of CRISPR and how they discovered it: https://www.broadinstitute.org/what-broad/areas-focus/project-spotlight/crispr-timeline
http://labiotech.eu/crispr-review-patent-war/
