CRISPR, Genetic Engineering, & Playing God
– Inspiration for The Progenitor Series
There are two lines from the Jurassic Park novel by Michael Crichton that I believe sum up our current era and mindset towards scientific discovery and progress; particularly that of genetic engineering and CRISPR. They are some of my favorites. The first is –
“Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science. - Jurassic Park” Click To Tweet
Our current culture worships knowledge, and to most of humanity there is no greater knowledge than that of scientific discovery. We no longer worship God, we worship science and knowledge, and genetic engineering has become the Holy Grail. CRISPR is a technology that can possibly cure disease, improve food, and redesign anything from mosquitoes to humans. A messiah to our sickly world.
What Is CRISPR?
CRISPR is an acronym for clustered regularly inter-spaced short palindromic repeats and is a family of DNA sequences found in the genomes of prokaryotic organisms such as bacteria and archaea. They are copies of small pieces of viruses. Bacteria use them like collections of mug shots to identify bad viruses.
Cas9(or “CRISPR-associated protein 9”) is an enzyme that uses CRISPR sequences as a guide to recognize and cleave specific strands of DNA that are complementary to the sequence. Cas9 enzymes together with CRISPR sequences form the basis of a technology known as CRISPR-Cas9that can be used to edit genes within organisms.
In short, it’s an inexpensive way to cut and splice together DNA to remove or add genes the way we want them to be. That’s a very basic explanation, but a fairly accurate one.
What Is CRISPR Currently Being Used For?
Humans have been tampering with genetics for thousands of years. We created modern Corgis and Pomeranians by selectively breeding pairs of wild wolves for docility, unknowingly selecting the genes controlling for size and temperament. Bananas became a breakfast staple as we continually bred its unpalatable ancestors to produce fruit with the least inedible seeds. It took centuries, but the results speak for themselves.
Researchers regularly use this technology to alter genes in plant, bacteria, and animal models. They remove a gene in lab mice and observe what traits or behaviors it affects. CRISPR makes these studies cheaper, faster, and more reliable.
Researchers at The University of Pennsylvania are using it to potentially treat multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. They harvest cells from bone marrow and edit the T cells to more accurately target cancer cells before putting them back into the body. The same technique is successful in treating sarcoma.
CRISPR-Cas9 is also developing treatments for diseases like sickle cell anemia. In sickle cell anemia, two bad copies of the Beta-globulin causes severe symptoms, while only one bad copy produces far fewer symptoms. Researchers have harvested blood cells, run the CRISPR system to repair the one bad copy, and reintroduced the fixed cells back into the bloodstream.
CRISPR Weapons – The Dark Side of Gene Editing
This just perfectly opens the door for my second quote from Jurassic Park.
“Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. - Jurassic Park” Click To Tweet
US intelligence has listed gene-editing technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 as weapons of mass destruction threats in theWorldwide Threat Assessment? The technology that we receive as our genetic Messiah, is also a possible weapon of mass destruction.
There is a (non-peer-reviewed) preprint essay onResearch Gatenamed “The Coming CRISPR Wars: Or why genome editing can be more dangerous than nuclear weapons”.
The author introduces the aspects of CRISPR-based gene editing. Specifically how its ease-of-use allows almost anyone to edit genes. He also warns you about the threats of CRISPR as a potentially dangerous weapon of war.
One belief is that it is a savior, namely that CRISPR is easy to use and almost anyone can use it to heal and cure a whole host of diseases and ailments.
The second belief reveals the darkness. The belief is that once once you know how to stop cancer, you know how to create it. Once you know how to undo something, you know how to do it.
So we have two possible outcomes:
- CRISPR is easy to use, and almost anyone can use it.
- Once you know how to stop cancer, you know how to create it.
Now you may very well come to a somewhat disturbing conclusion:
1 + 2 = It’s easy for anyone to create a so-called CRISPR cancer bomb. Almost anyone can do it?
The main reasons that CRISPR gene editing is potentially extremely dangerous is that it can:
- target specific genes
- be delivered to people through viruses
- edit selected groups of individuals, for example, by eye color
CRISPR in The Genesis Codex – Think of the Possibilities.
The duality of CRISPR is what drew me to it and, more specifically, genetic engineering as a main character in The Progenitor Series. I believe mankind is the perfect likeness of God Himself. I also believe that our original genetic design is perfect. Our problems today with genetic abnormalities, diseases, and illnesses stem from genetic tampering over the millennia starting with the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. This opens a whole host of questions and quandaries about diseases such as cancer and the role CRISPR can play in our future; whether for good or ill, or maybe both.
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