Cut & Paste

The Story of Crispr-Cas9 and Why Gene Editing Will Change Everything.

- Fanie Van Rooyen

The discovery of an extremely precise, cheap and easy-to-use genome editing tool is causing a revolution in the field of genetic modification. It has the potential to cure thousands of diseases, to massively boost food security and will almost certainly herald the dawn of the era of genetically enhanced humans, changing the human genome forever. It’s a very big deal that has scientists equally excited and concerned.

In the 1997 science fiction film Gattaca, normal human beings are deemed as inferior to an upper class of genetically engineered “valid” humans, all with 20/20 vision, perfect skin and teeth, superior athleticism and intelligence and no genetic predisposition to genetic disease.

Fast-forward about 20 years: Chinese scientists have just announced (in November) that they were the first to use a revolutionary gene-editing technique called CRISPR-Cas9 to inject gene-altered cells into a living person, a patient with aggressive lung cancer. This, according to Nature, is part of a groundbreaking clinical trial at the West China Hospital in Chengdu that will likely kick off“Sputnik 2.0”, a biomedical space race between China and the US to see who can get gene-edited cells into the clinic first. Gene editing, and soon genetic enhancement in humans, has suddenly become a reality.