When humans began selectively breeding plants and animals thousands of years ago, they effectively blurred the lines between natural and ar...
When humans began selectively breeding plants and animals thousands of years ago, they effectively blurred the lines between natural and artificial selection, and took the first steps into the world of genetic modification.
Technology has brought us a long way since those primitive days. A great leap was made in the 1950s with the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and the first attempts at gene editing to alter traits.
The next monumental breakthrough was in 2012, when scientists stumbled upon a new way to influence evolution. Called CRISPR, or “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”, the technology is a powerful tool for editing genomes. It allows scientists to fix DNA segments, as easily as correcting an error in an article.
It is a tool that bacteria have been using for aeons. To protect itself from an invading virus, a bacteria will use what’s called a “Cas protein” to cut a part of the virus’ DNA and stitch it into the bacteria’s CRISPR region (a set of repeating patterns). This scissor and glue mechanism creates a memory of the infection, which is used to hunt around if the infection tries to sneak in again.
The CRISPR breakthrough won its discoverers the Nobel Prize in 2020. But in...
