If the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes had come out a few years later I believe there would have been mention of CRISPR. Sometimes science leads to technology, and other times technology aids in science. On occasion the two are one in the same.
The plot I made above shows that in the first five years of the second decade of the 20th century CRISPR went from being an obscure aspect of bacterial genetics to ubiquitous. Friends who had been utilizing “advanced” genetic engineering methods such as TALENS and zinc fingers switched overnight to a CRISPR/Cas9 framework.
As I’ve said before the 2010s are the decade when “reading” the genome becomes normal. We really don’t know what the CRISPR/Cas9 technology is capable of. It’s early years yet. With that, First Human Embryos Edited in U.S.. Technically they’re single celled zygotes. The science itself is not astounding. Rather, it is that the human rubicon has been passed in the United States. As indicated in the article there has been some jealousy about what the Chinese have been able to do because of a different cultural and regulatory framework.
There are those calling for a moratorium on this work (on humans). I’m not in favor or opposed. Rather, my question is simple: if CRISPR/Cas9 makes genetic engineering cheap, easy, and effective, how exactly are we going to enforce a world-wide moratorium? A Butlerian Jihad?
Note: I know that people are freaking about humans + genetic engineering. But most geneticists I know are more excited about the prospects of non-human work, since human clinical trials are going to be way in the future. Over 20 years since Dolly it’s notable to me that no human has been cloned from adult somatic cells yet.