Science Can Build A "Perfect" Human...
(But Should It Be Allowed?)
It can eradicate disease, revive extinct giants, or even create entirely new species. CRISPR edits the genetic source-code of life, pulling it apart and pasting it together again. But will it herald the dawn of a new enlightenment... or could it instead be a harbinger of a geneticallymodified dark age?
Superhumanly strong, forever young, and resistant to cancer. A new generation of super-humans could soon be in the pipeline thanks to CRISPR – a groundbreaking technology, that could turn life on Earth upside down in a few years.
In only 10 years, the new tool, created over millions of years of natural evolution in bacteria, has given researchers so far unobtainable control over the genetic material of life: DNA. CRISPR allows scientists to design brand new species and eliminate others, but it could also soon introduce the greatest medical revolution since the discovery of penicillin – with cancer as one of the first victims. And 10 new breakthroughs every day has made 2017 a milestone in scientific history.
CRISPR EVOLVED TO KILL
In 2007, scientists identified an ancient defensive weapon in bacteria. The monocellular organisms can track down invading virus and edit the hostile DNA by means of a set of simple tools. Scientists named the weapon Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, and now humans can control it.
The CRISPR toolbox consists of three elements – guide RNA, a genetic editor, and a DNA template. The guide RNA is a short sequence of RNA, which can be designed to find and bind to a specific DNA sequence such as a gene. The RNA guides the gene editor to the gene, which scientists would