Genome Editing: Future Potential and Ethical Concerns

Steffan98720 Apr, 2021Health

Scientists around the word are debating the scientific and ethical possibilities of using powerful gene editing tools, such as the CRISPR/Cas9 system, to treat heritable diseases in human embryos. In 1987, the discovery of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated (Cas) genes in single celled prokaryotic systems revolutionized genetic engineering. Initially thought to be sequences of structural significance only, their true potential was only discovered after observing that bacteria used these sequences to mark newly incorporated foreign (usually viral