One in three women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime, and family history means that a woman’s likelihood of having the disease will only go up. But what if there was a way to edit genetics on a molecular level to take out that trait and significantly reduce, and possibly eliminate, a person’s possibility of having cancer or some other kind of disease?
Scientists have been able to do something like this, called artificial selection, in crops and animals in an attempt to weed out undesirable traits and make certain breeds heartier, but genetic engineering of humans was recently done for the first time in the United States. A genetic editing program called CRISPR-Cas9 has been discovered, and it can be used for humans, animals, or plants. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, and it has been found in the immune system of bacteria. CRISPRs are made up of repeating genetic code, and they can help in pinpointing a specific part of DNA to edit it out.
Over 80 countries around the world have already utilized CRISPR to attempt to take out the ability of mosquitoes to carry malaria, to alter eggs so people with egg allergies can eat them, and to bring back species that have become extinct, such as the wooly mammoth. Some have even used it to help humans, and have tried to correct cells that lead to cystic fibrosis and cause HIV. Scientists have said that there are over 7,000 monogenetic diseases or diseases that can be traced back to one defect in the DNA, that could be treated by CRISPR. CRISPR-Cas9 cuts DNA stands and can be used by itself to target multiple kinds of genes at once, making it one of the most diverse and exciting genome editing programs.
Controversies and Possible Dangers
But, hardly any advancement in biotechnology and science, in general, is perfect, or free from controversy, and CRISPR and gene editing are no different. One man has even gone so far as to say that, “It seems gene editing is going to eliminate all disease or kill every last one of us.” A lot of the controversy surrounding this biotechnology deals with morality and ethics. Scientists and researchers have pointed out that if gene editing is used for altering DNA to rid a person’s chance of contracting a disease, it can also be used to genetically engineer the traits of a baby that don’t need to be changed, like hair color or eye color, or even something less innocent such as higher intelligence or athleticism to create a “perfect baby”.
Others worry that a biological weapon could be created that could harm people or countries. Eliminating a disease from a family line would be fantastic, but if something went wrong, it would impact future family members who never had a say in the matter of gene editing. And, since gene editing is so new and has been used so few times, others are concerned that, like with all biotechnological and medical advancements, it may have unforeseen and dangerous consequences that aren’t yet known about. It may be a simple matter of time and careful experimentation to tell if the benefits and positive consequences of CRISPR and genetic editing, in general, outweigh the potential dangers and ethical conflicts.
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