Changing genes in cells used to be both time consuming and sometimes impossible.
But with the help of Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna's genetic scissors CRISPR / Cas9, it is now possible to change the code of life within a few weeks.
Something that can have a great impact, of both a positive and negative nature.
In medicine, for example, many clinical trials are underway of new therapies for cancer and genetic scissors could make it possible to cure serious genetic diseases in the future.
But there are also risks with the new technology.
- We have to ask ourselves, what do we want to achieve with these technologies?
We can now change human DNA, we can change things that are no longer ethically defensible, says Johan Rockberg, associate professor of directional evolution at KTH.
Doping-classified technology since 2018
Sport is one of the areas where CRISPR could do a lot of damage and its use has been doped by Wada since 2018.
- If you do not anticipate the development, there is a great risk that genre editing will become standard in certain sports, at least in some countries, said Magnus Lundgren, microbiologist at Uppsala University, to the journal Forskning och framsteg when the technology was banned.
So far, no case of gene doping has been detected, but rumors have been circulating that experiments are underway.