In 1985, the chemist Steven A. Benner sat down with some colleagues and a notebook and sketched out a way to expand the alphabet of DNA. He has been trying to make those sketches real ever since.
At the end of 2018, Bill Gates, the multi-billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, used his personal blog to ruminate on “what’s going well and what isn’t with innovation in some areas where I work.”
The specific topics he addressed were Alzheimer’s disease, polio, energy, the next epidemic (probably flu), and gene editing – specifically, human germline gene editing. (Somatic gene editing, he notes, is less controversial.) Gates opens by referring to He Jiankui:
In Burkina Faso, the government is considering the use of genetically modified mosquitoes to eradicate malaria. In Nantucket, Mass., officials are looking at gene editing as a tool in the fight against Lyme disease. And scientists are using gene technology...
Within the Defense Department, one agency’s recent project sounds futuristic: millions of insects carrying viruses descend upon crops and then genetically modify them to withstand droughts, floods and foreign attacks, ensuring a permanently secure food supply.
