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In November 2018, a young Chinese scientist who had been to some of Doudna’s gene-editing conferences used CRISPR to edit embryos and remove a gene that produces a receptor for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It led to the birth of twin girls, the world’s first “designer babies.” There was an immediate outburst of awe and then shock.
When a plant inherited two dominant versions of the gene or a dominant and a recessive version, it would display the dominant trait. But if it happened to get two recessive versions of the gene, it would display that less common trait.
ribonucleic acid (RNA) and a similar molecule that lacks one oxygen atom and thus is called deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
“Hypocrisy in search of social acceptance erodes your self-respect.”
Pauling was stopped at the airport in New York and had his passport confiscated because he had been spouting enough pacifist opinions that the FBI thought he might be a threat to the country if allowed to travel. So he never got the chance to discuss the crystallography work done in England, thus helping the U.S. lose the race to figure out DNA.
It had two sugar-phosphate strands that twisted and spiraled to form a double-stranded helix. Protruding from these were the four bases in DNA: adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, now commonly known by the letters A, T, G, and C.
There was an exciting consequence of this structure: when the two strands split apart, they could perfectly replicate,
“Today we are learning the language in which God created life,” President Clinton proclaimed at the White
in August 1978, blasted into hypergrowth when it won a bet-the-company race to make a synthetic version of insulin to treat diabetes. Until then, one pound of insulin required eight thousand pounds of pancreas glands ripped from more than twenty-three thousand pigs or cows.
“for harnessing an ancient mechanism of bacterial immunity into a powerful and general technology for editing genomes.”
What about genetic modifications that help prevent a person from getting HIV or coronavirus or cancer or Alzheimer’s?
On most great moral issues, there are two competing perspectives. One emphasizes individual rights, personal liberty, and a deference to personal choice. Stemming from John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth century, this tradition recognizes that people will have different beliefs about what is good for their lives, and it argues that the state should give them a lot of liberty to make their own choices, as long as they do not harm others.
Experts on intelligence, he said, “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.”
Martin Doudna tended to categorize people as good or bad, with little respect for the shadings that most people contain.
Defoe’s 1722 book, A Journal of the Plague Year.
Vaccinations were pioneered in the 1790s by an English doctor named Edward Jenner who noticed that many milkmaids were immune to smallpox. They had all been infected by a form of pox that afflicts cows but is harmless to humans, and Jenner surmised that the cowpox had given the milkmaids immunity to smallpox. So he took some pus from a cowpox blister, rubbed it into scratches he made in the arm of his gardener’s eight-year-old son, and then (this was in the days before bioethics panels) exposed the kid to smallpox. He didn’t become ill.
