Have We Become Crispy?

The end of the last century and beginning of the new century saw the world undertaking a new project; the genomic mapping and sequencing within the human body. The Human Genome Project was an international scientific research project that cost well over $3 billion and now, we can get our own genomic sequences for a few hundred bucks. As technology advances and our understanding of genes grows, we continue to tamper with our coding to remove the mutations that become evident by chance or birth.

CRISPR, aka Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, was founded in 2012 by scientists who sought to "cut-and-paste" genomic sequences. Lucky for them, CRISPR fulfilled its task. CRISPR functions as a DNA sequence found in bacteria and archaea to fight against bacteria. While most believe that this was an anti-viral tool only found in prokaryotes, modern day science has managed to prove otherwise.

Cas9, an enzyme associated with CRISPR, essentially acts as molecular scissors that cut the DNA at a certain base pairing at the lead of a guide RNA (gRNA). This can cause one of three things: a disruption, deletion, or insertion. From there, the body's natural DNA self-correcting parts fix the intentional mutation caused by CRISPR to bring the desired effects that were hoped for.

While this does sound like a magical medical technology, the implications from this need to be considered. CRISPR is still in its infancy in terms of other medical devices that are prevalent and has relatively fewer clinical tests done to it in comparison to everything else in the market. Furthermore, CRISPR can cut at the wrong places and could bind at the wrong places or could never bind. CRISPR is an ethical hot topic, however, as we continue to advance in medicine, the quarrels and concerns will come to rest as we continue to test further.