21st Century Begats

What was once a trickle of media mentions has become a cascade. The Economist devotes this week's cover to CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). The Economist even uses the "G" word.

There are those who will oppose CRISPR because it lets humans play God.

The gene-editing technology is remarkably easy to use, "like the find-and-replace function on a word processor."

CRISPR has one additional feature not present in old-fashioned gene-splicing: it can change not only the organism but also all of its descendants. [bold and italics added]

By changing a gene in an early-stage embryo, or in the cell that makes an egg, you could ensure that the change is found in every cell in the adult body—including its own eggs or sperm, which would pass it to the next generation and thus on down through the ages. No one is pursuing such avenues in the clinic as yet.

We can do more than Victor Frankenstein ever imagined: we can create the monster, who will beget another monster, who will beget...

Model of fruit fly DNA at San Francisco's Exploratorium: "Changing even one chemical 'letter' in an animal's
DNA can sometimes cause major changes to its body."