Have you ever wished that there were something different about yourself ?
Maybe you imagined yourself taller, thinner, or stronger ? Smarter ? More attractive ? Healthier ?
Or perhaps, as much as you love your children, you wished that there was something different about them. It is not that the love is missing, but it is precisely because you love them that you imagine they would be happier if they were different in some way.
It is also possible that some from of genetic disease runs in your family or a predisposition to cancer, Alzheimer's, or to some other potentially terrible health problem.
Until recently, you would have been able to do very little, if anything, about these situations, thoughts, and feelings. However, that might soon change. While you might not be able to fundamentally transform yourself of your existing children, in the near future, you just might be able to play Nature with your own new, little creations. Think of it as a personal kind of experiment.
Technology that is already available today may well make this experimentation possible for anyone who can pay the price to make a new person, only one that is hoped to be "better". I mean a designer baby. You would be literally designing and producing a new type of baby via the same sort of technology that is used to make a GM tomato, mouse, or monkey.
The baby would be a genetically modified human or, to phrase it in an edgier manner, a GM HUMAN.
This technology will eventually become widely available. It might take two, five, or ten years, but it is coming.
Should you as a parent do it ? Many of us will answer, "YES".
Science fiction became our reality, and we don't even think about it. We're at a similar point today with genetic engineering. So let's talk about it. Where it came from, what we're doing right now, and about a recent breakthrough, that will change how we live and what we perceive as normal, forever.
In the 1990's, there was also a brief foray into human engineering. To treat maternal infertility, babies were made that carried genetic information from 3 humans. Making them the first human ever to have 3 genetic parents. Today there are super muscled pigs, fast-growing salmon, featherless chicken, and see-through frogs. On the fun side, we made things glow in the dark. Fluorescent Zebrafish are available for as little as 700 hundreds rupees. All of this is already very impressive, but until recently gene editing was extremely expensive, complicated, and took a long time to do. This has now changed with a revolutionary new technology now entering the stage- CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). Overnight, the costs of engineering have shrunk by 99%. Instead of a year, it takes few weeks to conduct experiments, and basically everybody with a lab can do it. It's hard to get across how big a technical revolution CRISPR is. It literally has the potential to change humanity forever.
Why did this sudden revolution happen and how does it work ?
Bacteria and viruses have been fighting since the dawn of life. So called bacteriophages or phages hunt bacteria. In the ocean, phages kill 40% of them every single day. Phages do this by inserting their own genetic code into the bacteria and taking them over to use them as factories. The bacteria tried to resist but failed most of the time because their protection tools are too weak, But sometimes bacteria survive an attack. Only if they do so they activate their most effective antivirus system: They save a part of the virus DNA in their own genetic code in a DNA archive called CRISPR. Here it's stored safely until it's needed. When the virus attacks again, the bacterium quickly makes an RNA copy from the DNA archive and arms a secret weapon- a protein called CAS9.
The protein now scans the bacterium's inside for signs of the virus invader by comparing every bit of DNA it finds to the sample from the archive. When it finds a 100% perfect match, it's activated and cuts out the virus DNA, making it useless, protecting the bacterium against the attack.
What's special is that CAS9 is very precise, almost like a DNA surgeon. The revolution began when scientists figured out that the CRISPR system is programmable. You can just give it a copy of DNA you want to modify and put the system into a living cell. If the old techniques of genetic manipulation were like a map, CRISPR is like a GPS system. Aside from being precise, cheap, and easy, CRISPR offers the ability to edit live cells, to switch genes on and off, and target and study particular DNA sequences. It also works fro every type of cell: Microorganisms, Plants, Animals, or Humans.
But despite the revolution CRISPR is for science, it's still just a first generation tool. More precise tools are already being created and used as we speak.
In 2015, scientists use CRISPR to cut the virus out of living cells from patients in the lab, proving that it was possible. Only about a year later, they carried out a larger scale project with rats that had the HIV virus in basically all of their body cells. By simply injecting CRISPR into the rats tails, they were able to remove more than 50% of the virus from cells all over the body. In a few decades, a CRISPR therapy might cure HIV and other retroviruses, viruses that hide inside human DNA like Herpes could be eradicated this way.
CRISPR could also defeat one of our worst enemies- Cancer. Cancer occurs when cells refuse to die and keep multiplying while concealing themselves from the immune system. CRISPR gives us the means to edit your immune cells and make them better cancer hunters. Getting rid of cancer might eventually mean getting just a couple of injections of a few thousand of your own cells that have been engineered in the lab to heal you for good.
The first clinical trial for a CRISPR cancer treatment on human patients was approved in early 2016 in the US. Not even a month later, Chinese scientists announced that they would treat lung cancer patients with immune cells modified with CRISPR in August 2016. Things are picking up pace quickly.
And then there are genetic diseases like Colour blindness, Hemophilia, Huntington's disease etc. There are thousands of them and they range from mildly annoying deadly or entail decades of suffering. With a powerful tool like CRISPR, we may be able to end this.
Over 3000 genetic diseases are caused by a single incorrect letter in your DNA. We are already building a modified version of CAS9 that is made to change just a single letter, fixing the disease in the cell. In a decade or two, we could possibly cure thousands of diseases forever. But all of these medical applications have one thing in common: they are limited to the individual and die with them, except if you use them on reproductive cells or very early embryos. But CRISPR can and probably will be used for much more: The creation of modified humans, designer babies, and will mean gradual, but irreversible changes to the human gene pool.
Intelligence, beauty, strength and life expectancy are all controlled by our genes, which means you could add all these characteristics into one individual before birth. The first thing you need is a skin cell which can be converted into a human fetes. There are around 35 billions skin cells in your body. It's astonishing to know that each individual skin cell has the potential to become fully-grown human being. First, you take skin cells, they could be from a male or a female, one person is enough, then you convert them into embryonic stem cells. These embryonic stem cells have the capacity to become any other type of cell in the body: heart cell, lung cell, liver cell, neurons and the list goes on. And since we're interested in creating a human being, we would convert these stem cells into sperm and eggs. This can be done through a process called cellular reprogramming. And it works by feeding stem cells the right ingredients of hormones and growth factors and sometimes a bit of genetic modification. Depending on the combination of hormones and growth factors that you choose, you can force stem cells to become any type of cell you want. Now that we have converted skin cells indirectly into sperm and eggs. We can fertilise the egg using the sperm through in-vitro fertilization, a standard procedure that is currently used by millions of infertile couples around the world and it has existed since the 1970s.
In-vitro fertilization allows us to create embryos from sperm and eggs under lab conditions. Unfortunately, these embryos are susceptible to genetic diseases, they could mutate and eventually experience serious health problems after birth. To solve this problems, we will have to genetically engineer these embryos using CRISPR CAS9. Genetic engineering works best on embryos because the number of cells is very low and you can edit all of them with minimal efforts. They're simply 4 to 8 cells. However, adult humans already have trillions of cells ( 37.2 trillions cells to be precise), editing all of them at once with our current technology is near impossible. Genetic information can pass through generation. If you genetically engineer an embryo to become someone intelligent, the intelligence will pass on from one generation to next.
Take Down syndrome for example, one of the most common genetic defects.
In Europe, about 92% of all pregnancies where it's detected are terminated. The decision to terminate pregnancy is incredibly personal, but it's important to acknowledge the reality that we are pre-selecting humans based on medical conditions. There is also no use in pretending this will change, so we have to act carefully and respectfully as we advance the technology and can make more and more selections. But none of this will happen soon. As powerful as CRISPR is and it's not infallible yet. Wrong edits still happen as well as unknown errors that can occur anywhere in the DNA and might go unnoticed. if this happen it also might accidentally trigger unwanted changes.
THIS IS ONE OF MY FAVOURITE TOPIC, READ THE FULL BLOG AND DO COMMENT IF YOU HAVE ANY INQUIRIES. TO READ THIS KIND OF INTERESTING STUFF DO CHECK OUT MY PREVIOUS BLOGS. STAY TUNED WITH ME. THANK YOU.
Maybe you imagined yourself taller, thinner, or stronger ? Smarter ? More attractive ? Healthier ?
Or perhaps, as much as you love your children, you wished that there was something different about them. It is not that the love is missing, but it is precisely because you love them that you imagine they would be happier if they were different in some way.
It is also possible that some from of genetic disease runs in your family or a predisposition to cancer, Alzheimer's, or to some other potentially terrible health problem.
Until recently, you would have been able to do very little, if anything, about these situations, thoughts, and feelings. However, that might soon change. While you might not be able to fundamentally transform yourself of your existing children, in the near future, you just might be able to play Nature with your own new, little creations. Think of it as a personal kind of experiment.
Technology that is already available today may well make this experimentation possible for anyone who can pay the price to make a new person, only one that is hoped to be "better". I mean a designer baby. You would be literally designing and producing a new type of baby via the same sort of technology that is used to make a GM tomato, mouse, or monkey.
The baby would be a genetically modified human or, to phrase it in an edgier manner, a GM HUMAN.
This technology will eventually become widely available. It might take two, five, or ten years, but it is coming.
Should you as a parent do it ? Many of us will answer, "YES".
Science fiction became our reality, and we don't even think about it. We're at a similar point today with genetic engineering. So let's talk about it. Where it came from, what we're doing right now, and about a recent breakthrough, that will change how we live and what we perceive as normal, forever.
- GENETIC MODIFICATION
In the 1990's, there was also a brief foray into human engineering. To treat maternal infertility, babies were made that carried genetic information from 3 humans. Making them the first human ever to have 3 genetic parents. Today there are super muscled pigs, fast-growing salmon, featherless chicken, and see-through frogs. On the fun side, we made things glow in the dark. Fluorescent Zebrafish are available for as little as 700 hundreds rupees. All of this is already very impressive, but until recently gene editing was extremely expensive, complicated, and took a long time to do. This has now changed with a revolutionary new technology now entering the stage- CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). Overnight, the costs of engineering have shrunk by 99%. Instead of a year, it takes few weeks to conduct experiments, and basically everybody with a lab can do it. It's hard to get across how big a technical revolution CRISPR is. It literally has the potential to change humanity forever.
Why did this sudden revolution happen and how does it work ?
- THE OLDEST WAR ON EARTH
Bacteria and viruses have been fighting since the dawn of life. So called bacteriophages or phages hunt bacteria. In the ocean, phages kill 40% of them every single day. Phages do this by inserting their own genetic code into the bacteria and taking them over to use them as factories. The bacteria tried to resist but failed most of the time because their protection tools are too weak, But sometimes bacteria survive an attack. Only if they do so they activate their most effective antivirus system: They save a part of the virus DNA in their own genetic code in a DNA archive called CRISPR. Here it's stored safely until it's needed. When the virus attacks again, the bacterium quickly makes an RNA copy from the DNA archive and arms a secret weapon- a protein called CAS9.
What's special is that CAS9 is very precise, almost like a DNA surgeon. The revolution began when scientists figured out that the CRISPR system is programmable. You can just give it a copy of DNA you want to modify and put the system into a living cell. If the old techniques of genetic manipulation were like a map, CRISPR is like a GPS system. Aside from being precise, cheap, and easy, CRISPR offers the ability to edit live cells, to switch genes on and off, and target and study particular DNA sequences. It also works fro every type of cell: Microorganisms, Plants, Animals, or Humans.
But despite the revolution CRISPR is for science, it's still just a first generation tool. More precise tools are already being created and used as we speak.
- THE END OF DISEASE ?
In 2015, scientists use CRISPR to cut the virus out of living cells from patients in the lab, proving that it was possible. Only about a year later, they carried out a larger scale project with rats that had the HIV virus in basically all of their body cells. By simply injecting CRISPR into the rats tails, they were able to remove more than 50% of the virus from cells all over the body. In a few decades, a CRISPR therapy might cure HIV and other retroviruses, viruses that hide inside human DNA like Herpes could be eradicated this way.
CRISPR could also defeat one of our worst enemies- Cancer. Cancer occurs when cells refuse to die and keep multiplying while concealing themselves from the immune system. CRISPR gives us the means to edit your immune cells and make them better cancer hunters. Getting rid of cancer might eventually mean getting just a couple of injections of a few thousand of your own cells that have been engineered in the lab to heal you for good.
The first clinical trial for a CRISPR cancer treatment on human patients was approved in early 2016 in the US. Not even a month later, Chinese scientists announced that they would treat lung cancer patients with immune cells modified with CRISPR in August 2016. Things are picking up pace quickly.
And then there are genetic diseases like Colour blindness, Hemophilia, Huntington's disease etc. There are thousands of them and they range from mildly annoying deadly or entail decades of suffering. With a powerful tool like CRISPR, we may be able to end this.
Over 3000 genetic diseases are caused by a single incorrect letter in your DNA. We are already building a modified version of CAS9 that is made to change just a single letter, fixing the disease in the cell. In a decade or two, we could possibly cure thousands of diseases forever. But all of these medical applications have one thing in common: they are limited to the individual and die with them, except if you use them on reproductive cells or very early embryos. But CRISPR can and probably will be used for much more: The creation of modified humans, designer babies, and will mean gradual, but irreversible changes to the human gene pool.
- DESIGNER BABIES
Intelligence, beauty, strength and life expectancy are all controlled by our genes, which means you could add all these characteristics into one individual before birth. The first thing you need is a skin cell which can be converted into a human fetes. There are around 35 billions skin cells in your body. It's astonishing to know that each individual skin cell has the potential to become fully-grown human being. First, you take skin cells, they could be from a male or a female, one person is enough, then you convert them into embryonic stem cells. These embryonic stem cells have the capacity to become any other type of cell in the body: heart cell, lung cell, liver cell, neurons and the list goes on. And since we're interested in creating a human being, we would convert these stem cells into sperm and eggs. This can be done through a process called cellular reprogramming. And it works by feeding stem cells the right ingredients of hormones and growth factors and sometimes a bit of genetic modification. Depending on the combination of hormones and growth factors that you choose, you can force stem cells to become any type of cell you want. Now that we have converted skin cells indirectly into sperm and eggs. We can fertilise the egg using the sperm through in-vitro fertilization, a standard procedure that is currently used by millions of infertile couples around the world and it has existed since the 1970s.
In-vitro fertilization allows us to create embryos from sperm and eggs under lab conditions. Unfortunately, these embryos are susceptible to genetic diseases, they could mutate and eventually experience serious health problems after birth. To solve this problems, we will have to genetically engineer these embryos using CRISPR CAS9. Genetic engineering works best on embryos because the number of cells is very low and you can edit all of them with minimal efforts. They're simply 4 to 8 cells. However, adult humans already have trillions of cells ( 37.2 trillions cells to be precise), editing all of them at once with our current technology is near impossible. Genetic information can pass through generation. If you genetically engineer an embryo to become someone intelligent, the intelligence will pass on from one generation to next.
- A FEW GRAINS OF SALT
Take Down syndrome for example, one of the most common genetic defects.
In Europe, about 92% of all pregnancies where it's detected are terminated. The decision to terminate pregnancy is incredibly personal, but it's important to acknowledge the reality that we are pre-selecting humans based on medical conditions. There is also no use in pretending this will change, so we have to act carefully and respectfully as we advance the technology and can make more and more selections. But none of this will happen soon. As powerful as CRISPR is and it's not infallible yet. Wrong edits still happen as well as unknown errors that can occur anywhere in the DNA and might go unnoticed. if this happen it also might accidentally trigger unwanted changes.
- CONCLUSION
THIS IS ONE OF MY FAVOURITE TOPIC, READ THE FULL BLOG AND DO COMMENT IF YOU HAVE ANY INQUIRIES. TO READ THIS KIND OF INTERESTING STUFF DO CHECK OUT MY PREVIOUS BLOGS. STAY TUNED WITH ME. THANK YOU.
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