“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand, the free-thinking philosopher of technology, wrote in 1968. It’s a remark that could apply to nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, space travel or climate change mitigation. But perhaps it is what happened in 2012 that fits it best: the invention of the Crispr technology ….
The implications of gene editing are huge. Almost any inherited disease could in theory be corrected and therefore not passed on. Many other illnesses – chronic, acute or infectious – might one day be combatted with precisely targeted therapies. Immune cells to fight cancer may be precisely programmed.
Outside human medicine, crops and farm animals are already being protected from diseases, given nutritional improvements or endowed with higher yields.
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The speed at which gene editing has progressed in just 13 years since Crispr was invented is only the start. As the tools of gene editing grow smaller, more precise and capable of carrying larger cargoes, so the god-like power human beings will hold in their hands to direct evolution toward beneficial ends will be immense.
