A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

by Jennifer A. Doudna

These transformations have prompted geologists to propose that we rename this era the Anthropocene—the human epoch.

And with the newest and arguably most effective genetic engineering tool, CRISPR-Cas9 (CRISPR for short), the genome—an organism’s entire DNA content, including all its genes—has become almost as editable as a simple piece of text.

It turns out nature is less an engineer than a tinkerer, and a fairly sloppy one at that. Its carelessness can seem like outright cruelty for those people unlucky enough to inherit genetic mutations that turned out to be suboptimal.

Some bioethicists have voiced similar concerns, suggesting that germline editing changes the very nature of what it means to be human and that modifying the human gene pool would perniciously alter humanity itself. Philosophical objections like these are worth contemplating. But when I think about the pain that genetic diseases cause families, the stakes are simply too high to exclude the possibility of eventually using germline editing.