CRISPR’s promise: Balancing the benefits and risks of human gene editing

[W]hat if I told you [that a genetic mutation for cancer], passed down from generation to generation, can be snipped out of your genome entirely and you never pass it on to any of your offspring?

That is the promise of CRISPR, which not only has the potential to radically change the genetic code of all of humanity but could also fundamentally affect our health care, food system, farming and even the manufacturing and production industries.

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Like many scientific breakthroughs, this one comes with a lot of giant ethical questions.

For one, there are a lot of risks involved. With all the promise CRISPR holds, it’s not a perfect system, and scientists still need to do a lot more research here before we go messing with the human germline.

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But you can only hold the world back so long now that the tech is out there and Chinese scientists have already started to inject human beings with modified cells in a trial study using the CRISPR-Cas9 technology.

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But how far do we take this technology?…Is it okay to mess with the basic code of life just to keep up with some predetermined societal standard of genetic perfection?

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: WTF is CRISPR?