By Arunima Desai
Have you ever thought of possessing the ultimate power of being able to modify your own baby? Sounds pretty unprecedented, does it not? I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but designer babies have become a phenomenon of the present, gaining a lot of traction in the science community. To put it simply, designer babies have their genetic material altered to enhance their genotype or phenotype. Think of it as shopping for your own clothes: you select, try on, and buy the ones that fit your needs. We can all design our own babies using a revolutionary technique called ‘CRISPR Cas9’. Adam Nash, born in 2004, following In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) and Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), marked the birth of the first ever designer baby!
CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. And Cas9 is an enzyme. So in conjunction, the CRISPR associated Cas enzyme cuts and edits DNA with extreme precision at specific regions within the genome of an organism.
CRISPR Ca9 can give rise to a superior and advanced population, but that is far, far, far into the future.
To stress on the fascinating technology that allows us to photoshop our babies, CRISPR Cas9 is essentially used to remove a faulty gene that is associated with malicious genetic diseases. CRISPR is a promising treatment that can be a possible cure for a variety of diseases which include HIV, Huntington’s disease, Cancer, Blindness, Blood disorders, and Cystic Fibrosis. We can, undoubtedly, rid the human population of these genetic diseases with ease.
In application of this ingenious technology, CRISPR Cas9 is used for babies that would inherit the genes for genetic diseases. This seems far more practical and ethical than altering the genes of babies just for the design features which would otherwise give rise to a vicious cycle of a "new convention" for future generations.
Designing your baby is not entirely risk free. Alteration, insertion, and deletion of certain genes can result in unpredictable and unwanted changes that can be passed on in the lineage. Adding on, the procedure to customize your baby is ridiculously expensive. For example, the expense for IVF in the USA on average is $20,000 and the testing can add up to another $10,000. This further reinforces socio-economic divisions in the society; the wealthiest of the wealthy can afford to manipulate the population that suits their needs. To reiterate, we simply cannot be ignorant about this controversial process, and instead utilize the vast opportunities that CRISPR Cas9 provides for the greater good of the human race, while keeping the environment and its habitants in mind.
What do you think of the groundbreaking procedure of crafting babies of your choice? Is it a revolutionary technique to change the fate of the human race or a deadly missile that will destroy our species to nothing but ashes and debris?
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