You are pregnant, but you discover that your son unfortunately has a genetic mutation, he has Down syndrome. The doctors show you 3 possible scenarios, having the baby just like that, having an abortion due to the great responsibility that this would have, and as a last option, genetically editing it so that it does not have Down syndrome. Given these 3 paths, which one will you choose? Of course, this can’t be possible right now, but in no further future, we could do this and more thanks to CRISPR.
Good morning, my name is Sarah Naranjo and today, I'm going to explain a little bit more about this.
Humans have been using genetic engineering for millions of years, through selective breeding we reinforced the characteristics that most benefit us in animals and plants. We became almost experts without really understanding it, until in the end we discovered the code of life, the DNA. So, it was discovering the DNA to want to play with it.
Today there are muscular pigs, featherless chickens, or transparent frogs
all relatively incredible, but until a few years ago, genetic modification was extremely expensive, complicated and slow but that changed thanks to CRISPR. from one day to another, what used to take a year could be done in weeks, even anyone with a laboratory could use it.
CRISPR, is an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, the title does not matter now, because CRISPR literally has the potential to change humanity forever.
why do I say this?
Since life has existed on the planet, bacteria and viruses have been fighting since then, where crispr cas is a system by which bacteria defend themselves against viruses.
But how does it work?
When a virus infects a bacteria, it sends its DNA into that bacteria, when the bacteria manages to react, it breaks the viral DNA and when it breaks it, it inactivates it and obviously, the bacteria survives, but it doesn't just do that, it takes bits of the virus DNA and incorporates them into its own genome, not anywhere, it incorporates them into a specific region where it collects those bits of the virus, that region is crispr.
The interesting thing about this is that when that bacteria survives, it leaves offspring, and any offspring will have inherited that genome, so all its descendants have those bits in their genome, so that generations later when an offspring is infected again by an identical or very similar virus, a protein called CAS9, will take a copy of that genome that it had saved and will use it as a reference to search for the virus throughout the cell, guaranteeing its descendants a much higher survival than the the rest.
So they are precision molecular scissors, where the star actor in this process was a protein called Cas9.
So, crispr gives us the perfect solution. Why reinvent something when we can adapt what is already established by nature after millions of years of evolution? If bacterias can use crispr to cut and paste DNA in their genome in order to avoid infections, sure scientists can also use CRISPR to cut and past DNA in eukaryotic genomes to edit genes.
So, since we are going to cure Carlitos' cancer, why don't we fix that mutation that we saw in the diagnosis that could give him Parkinson's or Alzheimer's in 50 years? Or next to it one that could cause myopia? Because it would be negligent to have the tools and not make those arrangements, but what if in the process we take the opportunity to make him taller, more handsome, more intelligent? Where is the line between healing and improving?
Everything would begin with the intention of curing a disease, as always, but as technology progresses and is refined, it will become practically immoral not to use genetic modification, since refusing the cure would be condemning a child to suffering and death that could have been prevented.
This opens the doors to a new world, where we have evolution in our hands and we can direct those changes, and of course, if we are creative enough we can consider the scenario of what would happen if this technology falls into the hands of a government like the one from north korea? Or where it becomes one more reason for discrimination, quite rightly being more genetically advanced?
Let's imagine a future world in which we can clone that dog that has died, but also installing DNA mutations that make it more muscular; or growing tomatoes that remain ripe long after they have been picked, mushrooms that do not turn brown after long storage. In the countryside there are new breeds of cows with the same genetics resulting from hundreds of years of selective breeding, but, thanks to CRISPR, they no longer have horns. Pigs nearby have special mutations that make them resistant to viruses and allow them to develop muscles. Other pigs contain humanized genomes selectively manipulated so that the animals can one day be donors for humans. As incredible as it may seem, all these inventions that seem part of a dystopian reality have already been achieved with the help of CRISPR technology, and the list is much longer.
We have a lot to win, we could end disease, or extend life expectancy by centuries. It is true that this gives us a lot to think about, but being realistics, our opinion about genetic modification does not matter, what could have been considered science fiction is one step away from becoming reality, and perhaps, genetic modification may be just a natural step of the evolution of intelligent species.
I am Sarah Naranjo, currently in Step 10, at American School.
