Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing

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Thanksgiving weekend, November 2018: I settled in for a fifteen-hour flight from New York to Hong Kong to attend a scientific conference. It was a long trek for a three-day gathering of bioethicists, and I wasn’t expecting any major fireworks. Even Alta Charo, a member of the organizing committee, worried it might be “a really boring summit.”1

As we headed towards the Arctic Circle, I folded my laptop, ordered a Pot Noodle, and flicked through the in-flight entertainment menu before settling on an action film called Rampage. Following an explosion aboard the international space station, canisters containing a mysterious chemical crash to earth. Naturally, one lands in the San Diego Zoo, where Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson happens to work as a primatologist, contaminating his beloved albino gorilla, George. Two other animals—Lizzie the crocodile and Ralph the wolf—mutate overnight before converging on Chicago. This was all utterly ridiculous if mildly entertaining, but the material wreaking mutational mischief was the reason I was on this journey. “Have you heard of CRISPR?” Naomie Harris asks our chiseled hero.

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