Kevin Davies’s Editing Humanity takes you on a dizzying tour of CRISPR, from its discovery and naming by little-known Spanish microbiologist Francisco Mojica 25 years ago to the births of Lulu and Nana, the world’s first genetically edited humans. It took 13 years for the Human Genome Project to sequence the 3 billion bases in the human genome for the first time. Using a technique called micropore sequencing, you can now have yours done in less than 24 hours.
Along the ride, you learn first about how CRISPR (clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats) and its associated enzyme Cas-9 can be used to insert, modify, or delete DNA sequences in almost any organism. Although the system is an antiviral memory-enhanced immune system in bacteria, it can be used in almost any organism, since we all share the same basic DNA systems.
The best-known researchers in this field include Nobel laureates...