CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”) is an acronym. It stands for “Clusters of Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.” Don’t worry. I don’t understand that either. The real story about what CRISPR is and what it can do is a lot more interesting than that terminology might suggest. Scientists were smart to come up with a clever, pronounceable acronym. Otherwise, it would be a lot harder to get those of us who are not genetic engineers to pay attention to their research.

The technology was pioneered by Dr. Jennifer Doudna, a PhD biochemist working at the University of California at Berkeley. Others may have contributed to the science, but I give Dr. Doudna the lion’s share of the credit. She might just be the smartest human there is.

What Dr. Doudna discovered was that certain bacteria, in an effort to protect themselves from invading viruses, employ a mechanism whereby they can snip out sections of their attackers’ DNA. This destroys the virus and simultaneously gives the bacterium a pattern to use to recognize future attacks from similar viruses. It’s kind of like a microscopic immunization card. Pretty cool.

Scratching her head for a moment, (I’m visualizing here. Go with it.) Dr. Doudna suddenly comes to the realization that this tiny tool of microscopic medicine could be harnessed and bent to the will of genetic engineers. DNA is pretty resilient. If you snip a section out of it and have an alternative section sitting nearby that fits the space you created, the DNA strand will attract and connect to the floating fragment, as if it is eager to restore itself and go on about its business programming each and every feature of the body housing it.

It doesn’t take a Doudna to take the next logical step with this. There are many diseases, conditions and birth defects linked to specific areas of DNA. Conditions such as sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease and Down syndrome are only a few from a long list of things that most would argue should be prevented if at all possible. Think about it. What would it mean to completely eliminate the suffering in children caused by something like Tay-Sachs disease? We should do this, right?

Of course – but take heed. This technology could be easily abused.

Once you open Pandora’s box of gene tinkering, where does it end? Sure, it’s easy to defend using any kind of means to keep a child from suffering – to give them the best chance for a normal, healthy life. But CRISPR, it turns out, is easy and inexpensive to use. Sure, it took a brain the size of a planet to figure it out, but now the secret is revealed. Anyone, or any entity, with a decent lab and a few competent geneticists can go after the fruits of CRISPR. It won’t take long for humans, given our propensity to corruption, to learn to profit from the technology. Doctors could sell customizations for fetuses in the womb to expectant couples. For $5,000 we can guarantee the gender of your baby. Want blue eyes? Just check this box. That’s a $15,000 option. How about that athletic scholarship? For $25,000 we can install DNA to make your kid the best 3-point shooter in five states.

Don’t laugh. It gets worse from there. Remember an evil maniac by the name of Adolf Hitler? Suppose he had access to CRISPR. What horrific things would he have foisted upon the human race with a tool that could customize people in any way he saw fit? That’s a chilling thought.

Besides the risk of the technology falling into the wrong hands, there’s also the ethical issue of free choice. Correcting the DNA responsible for Down syndrome might seem like the right thing to do, but the baby in the womb doesn’t get a voice in the matter. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the United States today who have Down syndrome. The people who love and live with these individuals may argue that it would be wrong to change something that they have grown to accept and even embrace. What gives us the right to tamper with the unique individuality that this condition brings?

Step a little further into the ethical quagmire with me. Let’s suppose we decide that tinkering with any sort of genetic trait is just an arbitrary decision that can be made by parents and imposed upon an unsuspecting, unaware, and unconsenting individual. Not only are we imposing our potentially misguided and myopic judgement upon that individual, but also upon every single descendent that may spring from them in the future – forever. That’s some serious hubris.

The line must be drawn. Where to draw it is the question at hand. Doudna herself, feeling the responsibility for her role in letting the genie out of the bottle, has called for a moratorium on CRISPR development and use until the global community can agree on rules and regulations to rein it. Her concerns are falling on (at least some) deaf ears.

Chinese scientists have used CRISPR to splice human DNA into macaque monkeys. Yes, you read that right. I guess they never saw “Planet of the Apes”. In case you don’t believe me, here’s a link to an article about this latest foray into mad science.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613277/chinese-scientists-have-put-h…

In the big picture, CRISPR is like anything else on the technology spectrum. It must be managed responsibly. It can be used for nearly immeasurable good, but it can be equally dangerous. Nuclear technology brings us things like medical imagery, disease management capability and energy. It also can be used for weapons of mass destruction and can unleash deadly effects in other ways if abused. CRISPR is not really all that different.

Personally, I am appalled by the Chinese experiment. I think it’s way over the ethical line. It’s difficult to get multiple countries spanning multiple cultural viewpoints to agree on anything, but this is big. We are tampering with the very blueprint of our existence. We had better make sure we are doing it right – or else we should leave it alone.

This article was written by Tilmer Wright, Jr. Tilmer is an IT professional with over thirty years of experience wrestling with technology. In his spare time, he writes books. His second novel, The Bit Dance is a cautionary tale about what can happen when technology runs away from its creators. You can find links to Tilmer’s books at the following location.

https://www.amazon.com/Tilmer-Wright/e/B00DVKGG4K%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_s…