If you could order your baby’s hair color a la carte, would you? It’s possible in the near future with gene editing. I’ll dive deeper into that below.
3 things to start your day:
Obamacare safe: The Republican-dominated Supreme Court signaled support for the Affordable Healthcare Act (ACA) to continue
Winter cometh: Covid-19 infections are at an all-time high, and so are hospitalizations (meaning an increase in severe cases)
Beyonce: Peloton anticipated people would need new workout motivation this winter; the company struck a timely deal with Beyonce to workout to her tunes
What’s trending:
Google searches for “supreme court meeting today” were up 4,650% yesterday because of ACA discussions
People are still uncertain about the election. The search “when do states certify election results” shot up 850% in the past two days
Thinking about fame? Nano influencers range from 1k-10k followers on their social channels. 12.1K people search for influencers per month and increasing, looking for a side hustle using their curated instagram
Designer babies for breakfast:
CRISPR is a technology used to edit the genes of an organism with extreme precision.
It’s widely researched and undoubtedly the future of food, plants, and animals because of its accessibility and benefits. It could also be used to “edit” humans in the future. CRISPR has the potential to change people’s lives, such as removing the genes in an embryo causing fatal conditions. It seems like a no-brainer to prevent illness, but at what point is it too far?
In 2018, disgraced Chinese researcher He Jiankui was trending worldwide for using CRISPR to illegally implant edited embryos into two women’s bodies in a study (unbeknownst to them). Jiankui lied in the paperwork and gave two mothers embryos that were gene-edited to prevent HIV, but without them knowingly complying. Jiankui and his colleagues were sentenced to three years in prison. The media frenzy calmed after the news, but brought a key question to light ever since: Is it ethical to design your baby?
CRISPR made headlines again this year when Drs. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing CRISPR-Cas9. It’s basically a“genetic scissors” that snips DNA and could potentially change how cancer is treated, but it can also create babies however we want them to be.
If we can create babies from a petri dish, is that playing God?
What makes humans unique is...our uniqueness. Life is rich and interesting because of how different people are, and it’s what makes life worth living. It seems wrong to play God for the future of the human race.
But put yourself in someone’s shoes. What if you were a doctor sitting across from two parents with a dying child? You had at your disposal a technology that could not only cure their baby, but regulate their weight because these parents suffered from obesity. That would seem cruel to keep that from them, and an exception would likely be made.
I anticipate there will be so many of these “exceptions,” that eventually all humans will act and look the same. (Twilight, anyone?) The rich would start to make babies look perfect and be the smartest at their school, and soon after it would be accessible to all social classes. Similar to the biodiversity of our world, it would cause cataclysmic disasters for the human race.
That’s my take, but it will be long after I am gone. For now, I’ll stick to something more simple like CRISPR tomatoes.
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Interesting and scary. Takes the fun out of life if there are no surprises