A Brief History of Gene Editing

Unbelievable as it seems, we can transfer heredity through the substance of DNA. It's possible for a lot of people to become successful. You have to have the right genes. For the first time, scientists have successfully repaired a faulty gene in human embryos. They used a process known as gene editing. It could help eliminate deadly genetic diseases, but some say it's too much like playing God and opening a dangerous Pandora's box. If this was going to be your baby, would you have gone ahead with this? This story begins in the 1850s in a small monastery and with this monk, Gregor Mendel. While he's experimenting with pea plants, he identifies that traits like colour and height pass from one generation to the next. He's the first to establish the principle of inheritance. After Mendel dies, the other monks in the abbey take the notes of his astonishing discovery, put them in a pile and burn them. Well, there's no question that Mendel was ahead of his time. I guess you'd say the scientific community was not ready to hear what he was saying. It's fraught with anxiety because there's this idea that you may be playing God. You may be trying to determine the future and taking control of things that people should not have control over. So other scientists rediscover what Mendel already knew. And in 1905, the word genetics appears for the first time. Research on DNA is one of the great new challenges in science. Skip forward to 1953 and scientists at Cambridge University discover that DNA has a double helix structure. DNA is a code. The structure of DNA showed exactly how that code was put together. Once you knew what the structure was, you could begin to introduce other chemicals. You could take things apart. You could put them back together. All those types of things you could suddenly start studying. In the 1970s, American biochemist Paul Berg isolates DNA from different sources. Then he cuts and splices them together. The result is recombinant DNA. He writes a letter about the potential biohazards of what he's just discovered. All gene editing experiments stop until 1975 and the Asilomar conference in California. A group of around 140 scientists, physicians and lawyers come up with practical and ethical guidelines. It was almost like a nuclear treaty for biotechnology. Scientists were looking at recombinant DNA and the idea of doing positive things. Somebody else could take these and start using them to make poisons, to make bioterrorist weapons. So they felt like it was time to take a step back, create some rules and that's what they did. By 1994, the first genetically engineered food hits the shelves. Controversy is swirling around an updated variety of the humble tomato. It's called the flavor saver. 2012 is the year of a landmark discovery. It's called CRISPR. CRISPR. CRISPR-Cas9. There's a dispute about who actually discovered this tool for editing the human genome. But now scientists can cut out faulty sections of DNA and replace them with healthy ones. It's cheap, it's easy to use. I've watched people use CRISPR in a neighborhood laboratory and these were folks that were no more scientists than you and I. That's exciting because that gives you all kinds of power to do experimentation. The concerns are that people might use this say to increase the strength of their offspring or to choose eye color to try to affect personality. The number of gene editing advances using CRISPR is growing worldwide and soon China steps up its efforts to dominate the biotechnology sphere. And in 2018, this happens. Irresponsible, disturbing, inappropriate. That's how two of the inventors of a gene editing tool are describing a Chinese scientist's experiment that helped create genetically edited babies. From what I've read, he had relatively high-minded ideals about what he was doing and I think his impression was that it was going to be welcomed. The audience that he sat in front of was really pretty horrified and eventually the Chinese government really kind of started to turn against him. The interesting thing is that every time a new technology comes along, everybody talks about it as though it's a Pandora's box and that these evils are going to fly out with the good. And that is true. There's always risk. But that's the story of science. The whole idea is to open up these boxes and to see what's inside and each time you open up a box, there's another box inside of it. And that's what's going to happen with CRISPR is the revelations will continue and the controversies will continue. That's just the way science goes.