Designer Babies and CRISPR

Choices; every day, we have to make a plethora of choices, choices that can change the future and impact the rest of our lives. Today, one such choice dawns upon us: genetic modification. At first glance, this idea seems to be noble, by modifying our genes, we can ensure better health and immunity against loads of diseases for our future generations.

But why would the great human race stop itself here? Why not add the gift of super strength to the child or how about laser eyes or mesmerising beauty or even better the ability to glow in the dark?

HELL! We could create designer babies. This is when our motive for better and equal opportunities gives way to absurdity.

Designer babies and genetic modification are perhaps two of the most controversial topics in the science community.

It raises many questions, such as who will have access to this new technology? How will those children who are not genetically modified compete with those who are? What happens if this technology ends up in the hands of the wrong people?

This post's point is not to answer these questions but rather throw light on the technology that has made humanity actually consider such a future, which was once simply deemed as science fiction.

Even though many gene-editing tools have been developed, the most popular and the one which has gained most attraction is the CRISPR Cas9 system.

It is not only precise and efficient but also cost-effective, due to which it has the edge over other such technologies. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (Don't worry, it's just a fancy term you won't remember).

CRISPR is actually a natural process that serves as a basis of the bacterial immune system. It is made of short repeating segments of bacterial DNA separated by spacer DNA (a short strand of DNA that separates repeated sequences of RNA).

Scientists found that this spacer DNA was actually viral DNA embedded in Bacteria. When viruses invade a bacterium, it introduces its own DNA in the cell and utilises its machinery to replicate itself. In response bacterial protein known as Cas9 cuts a part of the Viral DNA and embeds it in its own DNA. This viral DNA is then converted into RNA, which combines with the Cas protein. This combined complex attacks and disables the virus DNA whenever it enters again. Hence, providing immunity.

This process can be replicated in the laboratories to modify certain genes to our advantage. The Cas complex can be introduced in cells by attaching the DNA code which we want to modify to the Cas protein. This complex cuts the host's genome at the location we specified, hence disabling it. The body then uses various methods to stitch a new gene in place of the cut one.

CRISPR Cas9 can change the course of the future, and though it is still not advanced enough to help us create a new generation with mutant-like powers, it indeed is a start. Decades later, we will have to choose whether we support gene editing or not, but it's just enough to fathom it for now.

FACT- The 2020 Nobel prize in Chemistry was jointly awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna (the two scientists who developed the Crispr-Cas9 system for genome editing)