Designer babies, genetically engineered to be super-smart, disease free, and physically fit, are the stuff of science fiction. But science fiction often predicts reality.
The ability to edit human genes and, consequently, actually engineer a human being from birth, is something science is far closer to achieving than many may think.
A fascinating new deep dive from MIT Technology Review explains just how close this technology is and why at this point, even though there are still scientific hurdles that need to be cleared, it's almost more a question of ethics than science: what kind of genetic edits to a person are acceptable, especially before they are even born?
The simple and marginally more accepted use of this technology would be to make sure that no one is born with a genetic condition like Huntington's disease, which causes an incurable breakdown of the brain. The scarier and seemingly sci-fi scenario is that genetic editing could allow an elite group to create children who are naturally smarter, stronger, and healthier than everyone else in society.
Jennifer Doudna, a Berkeley biologist who co-discovered the key technology that will theoretically make genetic engineered children possible, is so concerned about what this technology could do that in January she held a meeting to try to get American scientists to pause research before it's irreversible. But with studies being carried out all over the globe and rumors of experiments editing human embryos already said to be under review for publication in China, the fact that this will happen seems inevitable.
"Most of the public," Doudna told MIT Tech Review's Antonio Regalado, "does not appreciate what is coming."
Where the science is now
The key to gene editing that Doudna helped discover three years ago is CRISPR-Cas9, a technology from the natural world that she and Emmanuelle Charpentier harnessed and that is now already in wide use. Regalado describes CRISPR as a tool that allows biologists to basically "search-and-replace" components of DNA, meaning they can rewrite specific segments of something's genetic code.
Don't want the code that's related to a particular disease? This will allow us to rewrite it.
That can't be done with perfect accuracy yet: CRISPR currently successfully deletes target code 40% of the time and switches it out correctly about 20% of the time. It can make other unwanted changes too, meaning that now, it's largely unreliable and inconsistent. But researchers expect these rates to improve.
Despite these imperfections, CRISPR has already been used in livestock like cows and pigs and even in monkeys, which showed last year for the first time that targeted genetic editing could be done successfully in primates. Livestock have been engineered to be healthier, while in the monkeys, researchers modified genes that regulate metabolism, immune cell development, and stem cells.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-make-a-genetically-edited-human-2015-3#ixzz3UgNVEVHu