Technology holds the promise of making our lives easier. Now, we're beginning to grapple
with whether it should make us better.
"Playing God," a new CBSN Originals documentary that airs Wednesday night, explores both the potential and possible pitfalls of CRISPR, a gene-editing technology developed in 2012. It's an exciting breakthrough that could revolutionize how we grow crops and breed animals. It could help us beat life-threatening diseases, like cancer, and screen unborn children for diseases even before they're conceived.
An acronym of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR is remarkably easy to use. It works by cutting into "flawed" genes, allowing them to be altered. With genome mapping getting cheaper by the day, we're approaching a time when changing an unborn child's hair or eye color could be a trivial effort.
That's why CRISPR is controversial, it could let us take control of nature. Ethicists are already debating the vast power CRISPR may unlock. They question whether it's right for parents to filter out traits they deem undesirable in order to create "designer" babies. So far, there is no answer.
Correspondent Adam Yamaguchi meets with Josiah Zayner, an Oakland, California, biohacker who has developed a $350 tool that helps him edit genes. In one scene, Zayner records himself experimenting with CRISPR to edit a gene in his muscles that will ultimately make him stronger. https://www.cnet.com/news/gene-editing-and-playing-god-how-far-can-we-go/
