Designer babies crawl closer
By Laurie Zoloth,
Cosmos Magazine
| 10. 05. 2015
Untitled Document
Super crops and healthy productive farm animals; mosquito populations controlled without pesticides; a cure for cancer … This fantasy world has loomed since the 1970s when we first learnt how to edit DNA, the code of life.
But the technology to do so turned out to be cumbersome, costly and unreliable. The failure rate in animal tests was so high that fixing a person’s genetic disease became out of the question.
This began to change with the discovery of proteins purpose-built to modify DNA: so-called zinc finger nuclei in the 1990s and TALENS in 2009. The success rate climbed high enough to start clinical trials: zinc finger nuclei were used to make human immune cells resistant to HIV, and TALENS was used to repair the gene that causes Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID).
And then scientists uncovered a new DNA-editing strategy in bacteria, used to edit out invading viruses. It was a modular system composed of proteins and RNA, termed CRISPR. And like all modular systems, it offered amazing versatility. The protein module (CAS 9) was a missile that...
Related Articles
By Alondra Nelson, Science | 09.11.2025
In the United States, the summer of 2025 will be remembered as artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) cruel summer—a season when the unheeded risks and dangers of AI became undeniably clear. Recent months have made visible the stakes of the unchecked use...
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
By Johana Bhuiyan, The Guardian | 09.23.2025
In March 2021, a 25-year-old US citizen was traveling through Chicago’s Midway airport when they were stopped by US border patrol agents. Though charged with no crime, the 25-year-old was subjected to a cheek swab to collect their DNA, which...
By Julie Métraux, Mother Jones | 09.23.2025