How Gene Editing Could Ruin Human Evolution

Aggregated News

http://time.com/4626571/crispr-gene-modification-evolution/

Silhouette of a baby. The baby's back is turned away from the camera, facing a window with sunlight. A rubber duck and several other toys are placed on the baby's side.

CRISPR snips away risky genes—but even the bad have good in them

In the 1960s, Thomas Kuhn suggested that scientific ideas undergo fits of revolution, challenging the foundation of establishment science. But it was Peter Galison who emphasized the impact of a tool or method, and encouraged the notion that technology creates the tangible breach or disruption of a field. Alfred Hersey, in a similar spirit, once told a colleague, “ideas come and go, but a method lasts.”

CRISPR-Cas9, the new gene modification tool, which has been heralded as a means for inserting ourselves into evolution, is itself evolving as a technology, even as you read this. That technology itself can evolve means there is greater urgency for how we think of our biology: either as a machine (which can break down and get new spare parts) or as part of ecology (whereby breakdown is not necessarily bad and can be part of growth, renewal or reorganization). CRISPR may be used to repair a gene that has a deficient product, such as an enzyme or receptor...

Human Genetic Modification

Genomics

U.S. Federal

A "Post-Human" Future?

This startup wants to prove gene-editing embryos is safe for making healthy babies

By Rob Stein, NPR [cites CGS' Katie Hasson] | 09.29.2026

Aggregated News

Cathy Tie slips on a white lab coat bearing her name and the logo of her startup: Origin Genomics. "Welcome!" she says as she leads an NPR reporter, photographer and videographer on an exclusive tour of Origin's labs located...

Human Genetic Modification

Is AI the End of the World as We Know It?

By Pete Shanks | 09.24.2026

Biopolitical Times

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a major focus of news recently, as it should have been, under the appropriately ridiculous name of Hugging Face, “a leading collaboration platform and community hub for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science.” In July, Hugging Face was hacked. The platform itself responded:

Earlier this week, we detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure. This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way...

U.S. Federal

'Epigenetic' editing is here: gene-tagging technique banishes hepatitis B virus

By Miryam Naddaf, Nature | 09.21.2026

Aggregated News

A wave of epigenetic therapies is offering hope as ways to cure chronic hepatitis B — a lingering liver infection that is caused by the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and affects more than 250 million people around the world. Currently...

Human Genetic Modification

Mice with human brain cells open a new testing ground for drugmakers to study disease

By Karen Weintraub, Endpoints News | 09.16.2026

Aggregated News

To better understand certain neuropsychiatric disorders, researchers at Stanford University have bred rodents that lack a cortex and hippocampus and then replaced those missing brain cells with human ones.

The altered mice, a scientific first, provided insights that would not...

Animal Biotechnologies

How Gene Editing Could Ruin Human Evolution

Perspectives

CRISPR snips away risky genes—but even the bad have good in them

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