What Is the World to Do About Gene-Editing?
When the journal Science chose the radical gene-editing technology CRISPR as its 2015 breakthrough of the year, the editorial team closed its description on a dire note. “For better or worse, we all now live in CRISPR’s world”, they wrote. Emerging into the public consciousness in 2013, CRISPR has been with us only as long as it takes to complete secondary school, but like the information technologies that rose alongside it, it is often described as if it is beyond regulation and direction, as if it had acquired its own uncompromising telos.
CRISPR works by repurposing parts of an ancient bacterial immune system to make the job of editing genes in almost any organism unprecedentedly simple and accurate.… Seguir leyendo »