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The Cut + Paste exhibition is at The Crick
IF you had the chance to choose elements of yourself to pass down, what would they be? The shape of your nose or maybe the colour of your hair? But would it be right to design an “enhanced” version of yourself?
And what about our food? Should we, for example, be able to alter crops to make them resistant to disease? (Just last month the law changed to allow the commercial development of gene-edited food in England).
These are some of the questions posed at the Francis Crick Institute’s exhibition Cut + Paste, which looks at genome editing. But what is genome editing and should we be worried about it?
Inside almost every cell in your body there is a unique set of instructions called your genome, which is made up of DNA.
Like an instruction manual for the body, a genome is an organism’s complete set of genetic instructions and can influence things such as the colour of our hair and how likely we are to develop certain diseases.
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