TED Talk on CRISPR/Cas9 system of genetic engineering

Jennifer Doudna talks on the currently mainstream method of genetic engineering, using the site-specific CRISPR/Cas system.

In addition to the brief summary of how CRISPR works, she also talks about how genetic engineering is currently being used and predicts the first applications of gene therapy will be mostly for immune system diseases, as white blood cells can be removed from the body and modified ex vivo, or outside the body. I totally agree with this, with our current level of technology it’s far easier to engineer a cell outside the body rather than risk any of the adverse reactions to gene therapy in humans.

Most importantly for this blog, she talks about whether this technology could be used for genetic enhancement. She lists simple things that many of us might even consider no different to vaccines, like enhancing our resistance to cardiovascular disease, before quickly moving into the ‘designer humans’ idea of specifying or changing height or eye colour.

She backs up the moratorium on human germline genetic engineering that I have mentioned on this blog before. I have my objections to this idea (see my previous post for those details), but I have just thought of another problem. As mentioned, cells that can be removed from the body and modified in a dish are most likely the first ones we will be able to modify. In addition to blood cells, and perhaps therapies based on stem cells, our gametes (sperm and eggs) are cells that can be removed from the body (especially so with sperm) and modified outside the body, used to create embryos that can be re-implanted. Thus, it’s likely to be relatively easy to prevent certain genetic diseases before embryos with those disease genes are even created.

I suspect the pressure to cure diseases will be much greater than the pressures to create a clone, so a moratorium on human germline engineering is probably going to be more difficult to defend than the one on cloning.