While of widespread popular interest and the basis for innumerable Hollywood films, this historic leap had little immediate impact in the provision of healthcare. The techniques required were prohibitively expensive and complex, meaning that for more than a generation advances in the field remained slow. But like anything subject to exponential development, what seemed like inertia soon gave way to a deluge of change.
Gene editing is a type of genetic engineering in which DNA is inserted, deleted or replaced in the genome of an organism. This is achieved by using restriction enzymes, or ‘molecular scissors’, of which – until recently – there had been three kinds: meganucleases, zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs) and transcription activator-like efector-based nucleases (TALEN). While there is significant variation in the price of each process, ZFNs and TALEN were developed more recently, all three remained out of reach for all but the wealthiest of institutions. Much like computers until the early 1970s, gene editing was the exclusive preserve of elite researchers and subject to massive overheads. As a result experimentation and trials were rare, expensive and slow.
That has changed in recent years, however, with the arrival of CRISPR-Cas9. CRISPR is a new approach which reduces the costs of gene editing by 99 per cent while cutting experiment times from months to weeks. While it is yet to be fully perfected and is not always suficiently precise, CRISPR is a programmable and easy-to-use technique for almost any lab, allowing scientists to edit genetic information with unprecedented eficiency. Just like SpaceX and rocket technology, CRISPR-Cas9 doesn’t permit humans to do anything particularly new. Rather, it illustrates how information wanting to be free disrupts mainstream views about scarcity and makes extreme supply possible. How we deal with biology, primarily our own, is set to be transformed just as radically as labour with automation, energy with renewables and resources with of-world mineral extraction.
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