2018-07-27 | permalink

Communities Raise Their Voices on Genetic Engineering

Crispr technology may allow scientists to change the environment forever, but working with the affected localities presents a challenge.

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Crispr, which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, isn’t the first new technology to pose such complicated questions. But Crispr offers “the potential to control evolution and change future species,” says biochemist Kevin Esvelt, an assistant professor at the Cambridge, Mass.-based MIT Media Lab, where Mice Against Ticks was born.

Crispr is the immune system of bacteria. Scientists adapted Crispr and the Cas9 enzyme that it produces to serve as a tool to edit DNA in plants, animals and humans. Researchers soon realized that Crispr might be used not only to edit or repair genes of people living with diseases but also to edit embryos, changing the DNA of future generations. It could also be used to create a so-called “gene drive,” spreading engineered genetic changes through populations of wild animals but also altering the environment in unpredictable ways. With so much at stake, Dr. Esvelt says, scientists must not make such decisions by themselves.

• WSJ: Communities Raise Their Voices on Genetic Engineering