GATTACA is wrong. Gene editing marks a new beginning — not the end — of humanity.

As gene editing becomes more mainstream, many are worried about potential implications of its use in medicine. Image by CDC on Unsplash

In 2012, an incidental discovery made at UC Berkeley changed the face of human history. Located in her lab above Latimer Hall, Jennifer Doudna uncovered something so remarkable that it would result in her receiving the Nobel Prize a mere eight years later. A protein complex from Streptococcus Pyogenes, which is as a part of the bacteria’s immune system, was discovered to be capable of editing DNA in living cells with incredibly high accuracy. Perplexed by this, a multinational team of researchers located in California, Massachusetts, and France sought to learn more about this mysterious protein. They uncovered DNA sequences corresponding to the unique protein complex and went on to describe them as Clustered, with Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which would be called CRISPR. As such, the name of the protein capable of editing genes became CRISPR Associated Protein 9 (Cas9). What makes Cas proteins so unique is their ability to be directed by something called a single guide RNA. While there have been numerous attempts to edit the genome of living things in the past, ensuring on-target specificity and flexibility remained an insurmountable challenge. That all changed in 2012, when it became possible to lead gene editing machinery to the right place for a small price — just 7$ per sgRNA. For such a low cost and high…