The CRISPR Era !

When the American "Manhattan " project split the atom for a long while the technical secret of how that was achieved was shared by a bevy of top world scientists.  Some of them with socialist leanings were unhappy that such a terrible weapon was exclusively in the hands of a western government and leaked the details to the Soviet Union.  Very quickly nuclear weapons entered the arsenals of five of the worlds great powers.

Now a new scientific discovery has been made and there is every chance that it will have an equal impact on the world we live in.   That discovery got the name CRISPR-cas9 and it allows the basic DNA of plants and animals to be subtracted or added to, resulting in a modification of what  each individual plant or animal becomes.

We now have gained the ability to process genetics and this could allow the DNA that results in a disease being removed, and replaced with DNA that delivers entirely different characteristics. We have gained the ability to shuffle the building blocks of life and create beings of our own making.

This discovery appalls some people - and electrifies others.  To some, it takes us where humans have no right to go, and to others it opens the way to a utopia where diseases may be conquered and this earth may be so bountiful that the prospect of famine is banished forever.

What horrifies some religious people is that CRISPR delivers the prospect of what some describe as "designer babies ".   It would be technically possible to introduce DNA changes that result in babies who will grow to a predetermined height and have predetermined hair colour, eye colour and general characteristics completely foreign to both the mother and fathers DNA     There seems to be few basic limitations on what can be achieved with CRISPR.

Any hope that this could be kept a tightly classified secret went out the window when the entire process was written-up in scientific papers and published on the Internet.   To make matters worse, the equipment necessary to process CRISPR can be found in any functioning high school science laboratory and is not of a complicated or expensive nature.

Of course scientists and governments have urged caution and compiled a moral code that they hope will apply to CRISPR technology, but the secret is out and the commercial opportunities will not be lost on individual scientists - who are free to make their own experiments in private.

It also seems likely that CRISPR will be very good to us here in Australia.    The Great Barrier Reef is one of the wonders of the world and it is here on our doorstep - and warmer oceans and bleaching are destroying the coral.   No doubt science will use CRISPR to modify the coral type to accommodate warmer water and the inevitable runoff from farming and mining activities along our northern coast.

There is the expectation that planet Earth will be home to ten billion people by mid century and we are looking to our vast inland for new food production. CRISPR has the capacity to create plants that require less water and at the same time deliver several crop seasons in the one year.   It is quite possible that we may develop an entirely new food type that relishes our dry inland and goes a long way towards becoming our key export.

As we found with the atom bomb, there is no way to backtrack and unlearn scientific discoveries once they are made.  CRISPR is now a fact of life.Now we have to learn to live with whatever it delivers  on the world stage !