Scientists conducting research involving human embryos have developed methods to edit the genome. By using technology that can be purchased online for $130 (USD) scientists can inject certain chemicals into the embryo, allowing them to override nature and design an outcome by literally rewriting the embryo’s genetic code at the core of the cell. Scientists are also learning to edit RNA, which is the expression of the genes. If DNA is like the alphabet, RNA spells the words.
While identifying which DNA sequences are crucial to helping a human embryo develop normally can be helpful, once that research has been completed, how will the technology be applied? This question raises all sorts of moral problems and dilemmas. CRISPR will democratize the power to improve on nature for scientists at nearly all levels of expertise in practically every field. Scientists can become the master designer and start to take the place of God.
Genetic editing is one of the most expansive frontiers ever contemplated by science. It is a broad revolution in genetics sparked by the technique called CRISPR-Cas9 (shorthand for Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). Though it is just four years old, this technology is transforming research into how to treat disease, what we eat and how we’ll generate electricity, fuel our cars and even save endangered species.
Experts believe that CRISPR can be used to reprogram the cells not just in humans but also in plants, insects–practically any piece of DNA on the planet. It has vast possibilities. For instance, scientists could rev up the body’s ability to fight cancer, create cows that give more milk, excise HIV cells, create tomatoes that really taste like tomatoes, even the ability to bring back extinct species of animals or prevent extinction of endangered species. CRISPR will affect every field of science. “It’s a game changer,” says Nobel laureate David Baltimore.
“The speed with which CRISPR has infiltrated so many areas of science is sobering to those most familiar with what the technology can do. Even well-intentioned scientists don’t understand all the possible downstream effects of unleashing altered organisms into the wild–including the human gene pool. Could terrorists deploy it as a weapon? For instance, snipping out a disease-causing gene may treat the ailment, but any change in genes or characteristics in a living thing may affect its ability to survive and reproduce in other ways down the line.
“Right now the only limiting factor in CRISPR is our imagination,” says North Carolina State University’s Rodolphe Barrangou, a CRISPR Researcher. “The question now is, where can you not use it?”
That raises another question. Where should you not use it? There are likely huge profits to be made with CRISPR in the biotech industry. But the dark side of CRISPR involves microbes that drive infectious diseases that are just a few DNA edits away from becoming super strains that could wipe out unprepared populations.
Director of U.S. National Intelligence James Clapper has already classified CRISPR as a weapon of mass destruction. What if CRISPR were used to create a killer mosquito or a DNA-damaging virus that could infect human cells and decimate the population.
Recently, 13 scientists, ethicists and lawyers agreed at a summit in Napa, California, that they would not use CRISPR to edit human reproductive cells like eggs and sperm because the long term effect of altering the human genome is very uncertain. But the debate is just beginning about the use of CRISPR on human embryos. And as CRISPR experimentation expands globally, what is to prevent rogue nations with equally rogue scientists from using it for unethical purposes. As eye-raising studies in various countries around the world begin to experiment with more ethically controversial situations, the debate is sure to heat up.
Some of the researchers hope that everybody working on CRISPR now and in the future will be transparent and that it will be used for ethical purposes.
“But if there was one sin above another which called for the destruction of the race by the flood, it was the base crime of amalgamation of man and beast which defaced the image of God, and caused confusion everywhere. God purposed to destroy by a flood that powerful, long-lived race that had corrupted their ways before him.” Spirit of Prophecy, Vol. 1, page 69.
“But as the days of Noe [were], so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.” Matthew 24:37.