The Genome Engineering Revolution

[For full original article with diagrams and tables, see here.]

Editor’s note: Ryan Clarke is a biochemistry PhD candidate with an interest in genetic engineering. He is a published scientist with a background in synthetic biology and social analytics. James Hyun is a PhD student in the life sciences with a background in molecular biology. He has published numerous scientific papers where genetically engineered microorganisms were used to produce high value therapeutic proteins.

Over the years, the debate surrounding the ethics of genome engineering research and applications has cultivated a sense of fear that societies depicted in movies like Gattaca, or the book Brave New World, could come to fruition. Although these scenarios seem socially impossible to execute, they were ultimately deemed scientifically far-fetched because the complexity of such tasks requires robust genome engineering skills and tools.

These discussions presented the notion that similar situations would begin to be confronted in the “distant” future, but that future is now. On April 22, 2015, the first-ever attempt to genome engineer a living human embryo was published in Protein & Cell, and this attempt was made...