thebulletin | Director of National Intelligence
James R. Clapper sent shock waves through the national security and
biotechnology communities with his assertion, in his Worldwide Threat Assessment testimony
to the Senate Armed Services Committee in February, that genome editing
had become a global danger. He went so far as to include it in the
report’s weapons of mass destruction section, alongside threats from
North Korea, China’s nuclear modernization, and chemical weapons in
Syria and Iraq. The new technology, he said, could open the door to
“potentially harmful biological agents or products,” with “far-reaching
economic and national security implications.”
So what has warranted this warning, and what can be done to mitigate the threat?
Since the discovery of the double helix in 1953,
biotechnology has made progress exceeding that of arguably any other
technology in human history. Genome editing is not a new process; it was
the subject of the 1975 Asilomar Conference,
convened to establish standards that would allow geneticists to conduct
cutting-edge research without endangering public health. Since then,
advances like the polymerase chain reaction process, the human genome project, and the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements project
have fueled our understanding of the human genome, accelerated through
advances in computing power, data storage, and big data algorithm
development. Landmark results include the first synthesis of a virus in 2002 and the first synthetic cell in 2010. Now along comes clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats—Crispr for short—which is changing everything.
Other
editing techniques have been around for more than a decade but they are
laborious, less accurate, and quite expensive. Before that, previous
traditional methods required generations to see results. While some
techniques can recognize longer DNA sequences and have better specificity than Crispr, they are costly ($5,000 for each order versus $30 for Crispr) and difficult to engineer, sometimes requiring several tries to identify a sequence that works. Hence the rise of Crispr, which, along with Crispr associated proteins (Cas), provides a precise way
to target, snip, and insert exact pieces of a genome. (The Crispr-Cas9
protein has received the most attention in this recent discussion, yet
other enzymatic proteins such as the Crispr-Cpf1 use a different type of “scissors” and might be just as effective.)
The
benefits of such technology are obvious. Because preferred traits can
rapidly enter a species, test animals like mice can be designed more
efficiently for biomedical experiments, mosquitoes can be engineered so
they cannot reproduce (and therefore cannot spread malaria), plants can
be developed for drought resistance and higher yields, and diseases can
be eliminated by deactivating the responsible genes in a given host. The
bioengineer and author Robert Carlson notes that genome editing shows great promise for next-generation plastics, agricultural products, bioremediation organisms, carbon-neutral fuels, novel enzymes, and better vaccines.
