The biggest tech revolution of the 21st century isn't digital, it's biological. A breakthrough called CRISPR has given us unprecedented control over the basic building blocks of life. It opens the door to curing diseases, reshaping the biosphere and designing our own children.

This Storyville documentary is a provocative exploration of CRISPR's far-reaching implications, through the eyes of the scientists who discovered it, the families it’s affecting and the bio-engineers who are testing its limits. How will this new power change our relationship with nature? What will it mean for human evolution? To begin to answer these questions, we must look back billions of years and peer into an uncertain future.

CRISPR is a technology that can be used to edit genes and, as such, will likely change the world.

The essence of CRISPR is simple: it’s a way of finding a specific bit of DNA inside a cell. After that, the next step in CRISPR gene editing is usually to alter that piece of DNA. However, CRISPR has also been adapted to do other things too, such as turning genes on or off without altering their sequence.

There were ways to edit the genomes of some plants and animals before the CRISPR method was unveiled in 2012 but it took years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. CRISPR has made it cheap and easy.

CRISPR is already widely used for scientific research, and in the not too distant future many of the plants and animals in our farms, gardens or homes may have been altered with CRISPR. In fact, some people already are eating CRISPRed food.

CRISPR technology also has the potential to transform medicine, enabling us to not only treat but also prevent many diseases. We may even decide to use it to change the genomes of our children. An attempt to do this in China has been condemned as premature and unethical, but some think it could benefit children in the future.

CRISPR is being used for all kinds of other purposes too, from fingerprinting cells and logging what happens inside them to directing evolution and creating gene drives.

The key to CRISPR is the many flavours of “Cas” proteins found in bacteria, where they help defend against viruses. The Cas9 protein is the most widely used by scientists. This protein can easily be programmed to find and bind to almost any desired target sequence, simply by giving it a piece of RNA to guide it in its search.

I am of two minds on this subject. On one hand, I definitely favor using gene bio-technology to correct genetic diseases.

On the other hand I am totally averse to using this gene splicing to create "designer children". In fact I find that to be nothing less than monstrous. That would, without a doubt, create a new class of human, one which would come to be looked upon as "superior". Ubermenschlegen comes to mind. A Hitlerian ideology.

I am of two minds on this subject. On one hand, I definitely favor using gene bio-technology to correct genetic diseases.

Two little girls called Lulu and Nana celebrate their first birthday this month. The Chinese twins are the first humans to have every cell in their body genetically modified using Crispr-Cas9, a revolutionary gene-editing process that allows the DNA in embryos to be edited to carry certain characteristics that can be passed down to their children and grandchildren.

When the twins’ birth was announced to the world by the US-trained biochemist He Jiankui, he described how he and his Chinese and American colleagues had used Crispr to introduce genetic mutations into otherwise healthy embryos in an attempt to minimise the girls’ susceptibility to HIV infection. Such an intervention was both unnecessary and possibly ineffective, and in direct defiance of scientific consensus and established ethical norms.

n the months following, He was labelled a “rogue” scientist, and elements of the mainstream scientific community scrambled to distance themselves.

The global market for Crispr gene-editing products as medicine, to develop new crops (such as spicy tomatoes or long-life mushrooms) and other uses is predicted to be $5.3bn by 2025. Continued advances in Crispr precision and ease of use, like the just reported prime editing approach, are likely to make that number even higher. Crispr gene editing has the potential to treat a myriad of monogenic diseases from sickle cell anaemia to muscular dystrophy and cancer.

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...spr-scientists


The genie's out of the bottle now, though .....

That's the bad news; the good news is:

Something else to think about. Who would be able to afford the expense of having "designer babies" ? Surely not the poor. Perhaps not even the economic middle class.