Genetically Modified People: Gene Editing Arrives in the Clinic

By Christopher Gerry — August 6, 2019

Genetically modified organisms may soon be walking among us. But don’t worry—it won’t be due to some horrible tomato-based experiment gone awry.

Pop culture often depicts laboratory research as a frenetic rush filled with exploding test tubes, plumes of greenish smoke, and hair-singeing breakthroughs. In reality, science is a methodical, incremental process that more closely resembles an oil tanker than a jet ski. Drug discovery tends to be particularly sluggish because we must be absolutely sure that a new medicine is both safe and effective before we let patients both pay for it and put it in their bodies.

True “eureka” moments are rare, and rarer still are findings that change how entire branches of medicine attack diseases. But they do happen. Alexander Fleming’s serendipitous discovery of penicillin sparked the “dawn of the antibiotic age.” Genentech’s laboratory-based production of human insulin launched the modern biotechnology industry. And now, less than a decade after it was first disclosed, a gene-altering technology called CRISPR is facing its first real clinical tests.......To Read More.....