THE CODE: The Code is a three-part video series investigating the roots of today’s most promising genetic technologies

Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. And those who do not remember the sometimes irrational exuberance around past advances in biomedicine may be doomed to buy into the hype around today’s. From curing Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s to eliminating cancer deaths, no goal has been too ambitious for the best minds in medicine to claim is within reach thanks to the latest scientific discovery.

Here is your genetic gut check.

This three-part series of documentary shorts, produced by Retro Report in partnership with STAT, looks back at the roots of three of today’s most promising genetic technologies: genetic testing to predict which diseases someone might develop, precision medicine to match people’s genes to the treatments most likely to work for them, and genome-editing via CRISPR to repair disease-causing genes. Watch and listen to experts explain how the 1980s and 1990s version of each was going to change medicine and save lives. It puts today’s promises in a whole new light.

PART 1

The race to sequence the human genome was also billed as a race...