Editing Humanity’s Future
To alter the human genome seems a dramatic act, one that places a solemn responsibility on those who would commit it. The genome of our species is, after all, an intimate part of who we are, the core of our biology, a repository of the many millions of years of evolution that have yielded the powerful, perverse creature that is a human being.
And yet we do something rather like this when we choose a mate. The raw material for evolution, the stuff with which natural selection can play, is genomic variation, and a main source of this variation is mixing the genomes of mothers and fathers. Whether you’re a teacher or banker, a carpenter or queen, who you reproduce with affects the genome of the next generation. This typically isn’t what people are thinking about when they pair up; choosing a mate fortunately doesn’t feel like an overwhelming responsibility to the species. Many forces affect our choice of partner: proximity, attraction, social compatibility, and just plain chance. What happens to the combining maternal and paternal genomes after fertilization is even less under our control. We mate and see what happens. Meanwhile, without our really thinking about it, the genome alters a little and carries on.
At least this is how it has been for most of human evolution. But things are changing. We are now able to make deliberate choices about the genome we pass on to our children and, by extension, to the species. Two main factors are at play here. First, we know a lot more than ever before about how genes shape us. And second, the technology for making precise changes to the genome is maturing quickly, most notably with the gene editing tool CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), for which Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Walter Isaacson in The Code Breaker tells the story of the development of CRISPR gene editing, which is based on a system of clever molecular scissors that bacteria have evolved to protect themselves against viruses. Doudna and Charpentier didn’t discover the CRISPR system in bacteria; that can be attributed to many scientists working in relative obscurity for decades, as Isaacson also illustrates. But they described how it functions: which protein forms the molecular machine that snips DNA, and how it can be guided by RNA (ribonucleic acid) to a precise spot in the genome. Crucially, they showed that CRISPR could be fashioned as a tool for genome editing. Isaacson, a prolific biographer and the former editor of Time, orients his book around Doudna, the Berkeley biochemist who co-led the team that showed exactly how CRISPR works and who has been part of the effort to understand and guide its societal impact.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/04/29/crispr-editing-humanity-future/?fbclid=IwAR24XnmKBhGYxT01iXTXZ9m-OFByl7qjkNWTGeqf1IxKFz_qErOHBGO8yCQ
Reviewed:
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity
Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing
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