CRISPR Ethical Issues

CRISPR is a new technology, a method that can edit genomes. It makes it possible for scientists to manipulate and make changes to the DNA in the cells of all organisms. Since this is such a new discovery, there hasn’t been done much testing and experimenting, which makes it unknown and none predictable for humans. It is said that with CRISPR, scientists will for example, be able to change genes in human embryos, and create so called “designer-babies”. There has been a lot of discussion around this topic, and the issue of gene editing in general has created several ethical issues that needs to be taken into consideration. But what exactly is CRISPR, and how may it effect the future? In this article, I will focus on explaining what CRISPR is, how it can be used e.g. CRISPR-Cas 9, and I will discuss the ethical issues of this method.

CRISPR is said to
So, when virus inject their DNA into a cell, and someone doesn’t have an immune system, the virus would usually take over the cell and be inserted into the genome, slowly killing the entire cell. The idea with CRISPR is that proteins are transcribed and translated by the Cas system, in addition to Cas making the spacer DNA transcribe special crispr RNA. The RNA fits into the protein and together they break apart the viral DNA and stop the infection before it has even begun. It is another issue if the genome doesn’t contain the right spacer that matches. In this situation, the cas system create a different type of protein, which takes the DNA, breaks it apart and copies it into the crispr system as a new spacer. All the spacers that are in the genome are unique, because they contain the “history” of previous infections, so it will keep us from being infected by the same virus. Now, this CRISPR system works the same way in everyone who has an immune system, but scientist have discovered a way to use the system to make changes in the genome however they