 It's getting late into January and the weather's getting crisper. I better put my coat on. A few days ago, a team of scientists from the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Research Facilities announced a refinement to a genetic technique that may be a huge deal. May be the hugest deal. Crisper isn't just the name of that drawer where your New Year's resolution to eat healthy goes to die. Clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats is a little bit of a mouthful, but it's actually a very descriptive name for what those crazy geneticists are up to. Let's review the basics. DNA is a chemical sequence of information that's built into a spiral, which you can find in just about any living thing. You can think of it like the design documents for how to make that thing. Sort of like a bat or a mushroom blueprint. There's a lot of complicated chemical machinery to process DNA, but the basic principle is that some part of it gets translated into RNA, which you can think of as manufacturing drawings to produce some specific element of that design, which are then transcribed into proteins, which are the physical meat that make up things like cells and muscles and hair and whatever. There's an insane amount of complexity and nuance to that process. Like, which parts of the DNA get read depend on how it's physically contorted inside the cell. And if you start reading the same genetic sequence from here, you'll get a totally different set of proteins than if you started reading it here. The fact that with all those layers of complexity, we can still say something like, oh, she's got her father's eyes, is simply astonishing. Now, that's what's supposed to happen, and it happens in almost every living thing on Earth. But viruses have discovered a bit of a shortcut. Rather than replicating themselves, instead, they just put their DNA around someone else's machinery in the hopes that it'll get picked up and accidentally manufactured. Of course, proper cellular organisms don't want to go to all that effort to manufacture someone else's crap, so they develop ways of identifying viruses and keeping their DNA from coming up the worst. CRISPR started off as one of those antiviral mechanisms. Bacteria that got sick of being infected by one particular kind of virus would actually keep that virus's DNA around inside their own, only with little brackets around it. The brackets are short palindromes of DNA code, like G-A-A-T-T-A-A-G, which let the rest of the cell know that it's not for fabrication. Quick side note, if you don't think that it's cool that life has a method for commenting out sections of genetic code just like any programming language, you can just get out of my face. Instead of making it, some bacteria use a protein that we call CAS for CRISPR associated, which grabs a 20-letter segment of that code and then roams about the cell looking for a match. If it finds any DNA that matches, it cuts it. That cutting screws up any inserted viral DNA and prevents it from replicating. Cool, right? Not as cool as what comes next. If you're a geneticist who wants to tinker with certain sequences of DNA, a protein that locates and then does something to a specific sequence in a living cell sounds like a pretty good deal. Unfortunately, CAS tends to be a little indiscriminate in what it cuts, which is a problem if you're a genetic engineer looking for something specific because you can't really be sure what you'll get out the other side. Maybe the DNA will be snipped neatly just the way that you want, or maybe they'll look like a ransom letter. And that inaccuracy can be a huge problem. Gene therapy trials, which showed remarkable promise, have been stalled for years because, although they worked 90% of the time, the other 10, they gave people cancer. That's why this recent announcement is a huge deal. These scientists claim to have tweaked CAS9 to be extremely accurate, only touching the gene sequences that it's supposed to. Now, geneticists have a very precise, not to mention extraordinarily cheap and easy to use tool, which can locate, cut, deactivate, activate, or rewrite any sequence of DNA that they want in a living cell. If it works the way that they're suggesting it does, it's going to be like moving from a typewriter to word processing software for genetics. We didn't start tinkering with the nuts and bolts of genetics until the 70s, and historically it's been a pretty exclusive thing. You needed a specialized lab with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment and a staff of highly trained scientists to make the most basic changes. But with CRISPR, that exclusivity proviso goes out the window. Anyone can buy some CAS9 for a few hundred bucks. Any halfway decent lab can use it to alter the DNA of anything. We're talking about the level of access going from the smartest PhDs at the most prestigious research institutions to home brewing in your garage. Now that anyone who knows a molecular biology can engineer any genome that they like, now that we can cheaply, easily, and accurately edit any DNA we care about, including human DNA, what's next? We can eliminate many monogenic diseases from the next generation of people if we want to. We just straight up get rid of them. Sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, just not a thing anymore. It would be expensive, but it's certainly within our reach. We might be able to wipe out entire species on a whim. The biotech company Oxitech has engineered a genetically sterile mosquito that has decimated mosquito populations in Brazil. We might be able to do that to any species that we've decided we'd rather not deal with anymore. We can exponentially expand our knowledge of the human genome by quickly and easily producing new genotypes of mice to experiment with. Or we could start experimenting with the 20,000 known human genes to find out which combinations result in desirable outcomes. There is an established CRISPR methodology for every single one of them, ready to roll. And the thing is, with this update to CRISPR, all of these things have just become immediately relevant. This isn't some far-flung future thing. This is a few months from now. There's been a call by bio-researchers for a worldwide moratorium on genetically engineering humans that's been more or less respected. It was easy to keep an eye on the handful of labs that could do it, and it was a super complicated and very expensive process that wasn't well-suited to a lot of practical applications. But now, every single person who's born with a genetic disorder that we've sequenced is going to have that moratorium to blame. There are a ton of ethical questions that come with CRISPR. I've talked about some of them before, but there's one in particular that's been bugging me. Now that we're at a point where we have the practical option to make future humans into whatever we want, what do we even want? For example, should our kids have the genetic makeup of super geniuses? I mean, intelligence is really useful and very powerful, but it is highly correlated with depression. What's more important? Intellect or happiness? It was easy to philosophize haphazardly about this sort of thing when we didn't have the technology we needed to make it a reality. But there's nothing stopping us from determining the genetic basis of a real person's actual life now. And we have a lot of thinking to do about what that means. Please talk about it with someone, because we're going to need the answers in short order. And don't forget to leave a comment below to let me know as you thunk. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop thunking.