If you could protect your future child from ever becoming ill or sick with a single, painless change to their genetic code that was proven to work, would you?
Unless you harbored the spirit of an anti-vaxxer mother, most likely yes.
Then, let’s ask a more contentious question: if this power was extended so that all traits of your future child were alterable, what would you change? Would it be moral to change anything other than deficiencies from the average standard of human health? Would it be immoral NOT to provide your child with extra intelligence, if you as a parent came from a disadvantaged household and were in poverty, unable to give your child the same standard of intelligence as a child from a well to do family? These are the questions we have to think about with the emergence of CRISPR, a precise, cheap, safe tool to edit the genetic code of an individual.
"CRISPR" stands for "clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats." It is a specialized region of DNA with two distinct characteristics: the presence of nucleotide repeats and spacers. CRISPR technology was adapted from the natural defense mechanisms of bacteria and archaea (the domain of single-celled microorganisms). These organisms use CRISPR-derived RNA and various Cas proteins, including Cas9, to foil attacks by viruses and other foreign bodies. They do so primarily by chopping up and destroying the DNA of a foreign invader. When these components are transferred into other, more complex, organisms, it allows for the manipulation of genes, or "editing."
So far, scientists have used it to reduce the severity of genetic deafness in mice, suggesting it could one day be used to treat the same type of hearing loss in people. They’ve created mushrooms that don’t brown easily and edited bone marrow cells in mice to treat sickle-cell anemia. Down the road, CRISPR might help us develop drought-tolerant crops and create powerful new antibiotics. CRISPR could one day even allow us to wipe out entire populations of malaria-spreading mosquitoes or resurrect once-extinct species like the passenger pigeon.
So yes, CRISPR is a powerful tool that can be used to affect not only our genome but other organisms we’ve domesticated. The ethical concerns that plague it, however are numerous: Chinese biophysicist and entrepreneur He Jiankui’s use of CRISPR gene-editing technology to alter the genetic code of two human babies rocked the international scientific community. And that’s only looking at the current state of affairs; returning to the example in the first paragraph, it isn’t infeasible to say that in the not so distant future we have to confront the possibility of true gene altering. We must keep in mind that CRISPR is a tool however, and that’s all it is- a very powerful one, albeit, but still one we have complete control over. It is up to us to what we make out of it.
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