As per Shiv’s recommendation during this week’s table talk, I watched the Gene Editing segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. And of course, he talked about gene editing and genetic engineering.
In one part of the segment, John Oliver showed a snippet of an interview to George Church, a geneticist, and the interviewer asked if CRISPR could give us unicorns. Now, let me back up a second and explain what CRISPR is. CRISPR is a protein found in bacteria and it forms part of their defense mechanism against host pathogens. Its function is to recognize exogenous DNA and destroy it. Applications of CRISPR were discovered to edit DNA strands and essentially use it as a “copy-paste” tool. For this reason, scientists have been focused on trying to use this technology to cure diseases but people like this reporter have bigger priorities.
Both things are very difficult to reach; it has been an uphill battle in effectively curing a disease in humans using CRISPR and we are still yet to see a unicorn.
This technology is relatively new and the world of science moves slowly but surely, so although these ideas sound extremely fascinating, the research still has a long way to go. I’m optimistic that science will be able to cure genetic diseases in humans and the research does look promising.