NEXT GENERATION GENOME EDITING TECHNOLOGIES Next-Generation-Genome-Editing-Technologies | Page 15

Apart from bringing extinct animals back to life, gene editing tools could be used for curing
diseases like Alzheimer’s. Then too targeting the correct gene still remains a challenge because
of deleterious effects, collateral damage and ethical concerns as even airplanes once were
considered a myth. Nevertheless, gene therapy is already in use to treat Sickle cell anemia,
blood thalassemia etc.
Heredity is reserved as it will be possible to stop the diseases from being inherited. In vitro
fertilization is already in use for avoiding such inheritance, but recently George Church, a
geneticist at Harvard Medical School showed that CRISPR edited sixty pig embryonic genes
simultaneously. Though doing the same with human genes is still not advisable as most of our
genes are in dormant stage and are still to be characterized. Deletion of such genes may prove
fatal to human kind.
Whatever may be the benefits of gene editing or it may or may not seem like magic, the
question still lingering in minds of young scholars and researchers is ‘Are we on a verge of
genetically engineered evolution?