Should we edit our own storyline ?
When Darwin published his ‘theory of evolution by natural selection’ it opened up a new frontier in humanity’s quest to understand the meaning of life, find our unique place on tree of life, figure out degree of our connectedness and relatedness to the rest of species, understand our pecking order in nature’s mind and ask the question how did we get here and more fundamentally why are we here?
It was in 1952 when Hershey-Chase experiment confirmed that underlying heredity material was in fact the DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid) and not proteins, the real quest to further understand the underlying molecular building blocks and associated mechanisms began.
A lot has been achieved in last 6o+ years, today we know for fact that the grand script of life as it stands on this planet and possibly beyond is written in a simple language that has four letters in its alphabet, A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine), T (thymine).
We know it is the sequence in which these letters are arranged in three letter words and way these words are written and read determines the kind of life we have on the planet.
The life with all its elaborate magical structural and functional manifestations as evident from various species on the planet, the ways the species live, the way the individuals and groups behave, the way their lives are orchestrated, generating all that awe and wonder with stupendous proportions that often leaves us spellbound that we simply utter, WOW !! That is life…
Today we have not only sequenced the human genome, genomes of thousands of species have been captured, catalogued, annotated and published, so the book is out there for anyone with sufficient level of genetic literacy to read and understand.
This genomic knowledge base carries not only our genetic history but history of all the life forms that our ancestors once lived with and shared their genetic stories with. It carries the answers to all the questions posed by environment to our ancestral species right from the days they were tiny bubbles in ancient oceans. The questions that our ancestors answered successfully so that today they decorate our heredity tree.
Well reading this grand script of life and admiring the serendipity is all good but we won’t be called ‘Homo Sapiens‘ if we did not tinker with our own script, did not edit our story to fix its mistakes, adress it shortcomings to satisfy our motives, ulterior or overt.
The tinkering techniques have certainly improved with time, during my university days gene editing was in its infancy, it would take months if not years to cut a piece of DNA, attach it to a delivery vehicle and somehow insert that vehicle inside the host, pray for it to integrate with host genome at right place and watch it do its wonder.
Now with the advent of new techniques like CRISPR, the process is much more precise and crisp.
CRIPSR has proven a real disruptor in last few years, it is basically a hack developed from bacterial defence mechanisms. In nature certain species of bacteria have mechanisms to incorporate snippets of viral DNA into its own DNA. These snippets are turned into RNA by host machinery where it forms complexes with endonuclease binding proteins . These protein complexes specifically bind to matching viral DNA and cleave it, effectively making it useless.
What an ingenious way that nature invented to fight infections. The hack is to simply feed the snipping endonuclease complex a desired sequence to determine the binding site and cleaving it. More on this later.
The technique holds great potential, especially where simple cut, copy and paste is good enough to edit the storyline. The technique is proving to be a true disruptor due to its simplicity, reach and ease of use.
With right kind of know how one can effectively order online a pre configured tool to precisely cut a piece of DNA and fix an organism in a makeshift biology lab in the garage, well that sounds like real gene editing.
Or may be it is playing god, at least in the eyes of our cousins ‘Homo Creations‘ who literally believe that life was cooked up in a pot by mixing some basic ingredients like earth, water, air, fire and sky by an invisible guy in an invisible world and we should not interfere with its recipe.
Hence the question, now that we can…
Should we edit our own storyline or let nature tinker with it as it seems fit ?
Originally published at scriptgrandeur.wordpress.com on January 9, 2016.
