Let's Talk About Designer Babies

We started off our day with lecture in the classroom this morning. Today, our topic revolved around CRISPR, which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (yes, I just really wanted to try writing it all out at least once, but don’t worry, for the rest of the blog, I will be referring to it as CRISPR, like a normal person).

To give a simplified explanation of CRISPR, it is a genome editing technique based off of the bacterial immune defense system. AS Dr. Fineschi told us, CRISPR is an invaluable technology not because it allows scientists to do things that were not possible before, but rather because it allows scientists to do these things in a much cheaper, faster, and more efficient way.

Mid-lecture, Dr. Fineschi introduced us to designer babies, which are genetically modified human beings. These humans are different from people receiving gene therapy, as these are humans developed from embryos that are modified by CRISPR. Unlike people undergoing gene therapy, an individual grown from a modified embryo will pass on its genes to the next generation and to the next and so forth.

Pre-debate

Dr. Fineschi then began the class activity, dividing and sorting our class into either the “pro designer babies” or “against designer babies” side. We didn’t get to choose which side we would be on, so everyone had to make do with the side they were given. Basically, it turned into a debate within the class, and we each had about 15 minutes to come up with and prepare arguments along with counterarguments.

I feel like this is an appropriate time to mention right now that I was in my school’s debate club freshman year for all of one week before I quit and never went back again. However, it turned out I really enjoyed this debate within the class about designer babies. It did take me a while to warm up into the discussion; I didn’t talk much in the 15 minutes we had to prepare or during the beginning of the debate, but eventually, I discovered that while I’m not that good at coming up with arguments of my own, I’m really good at finding the holes in the opposing side’s arguments. I also discovered it was even more satisfying to point out those holes out to them.

Obviously, we could not come to a conclusion to settle a debate that is still ongoing and will continue to grow as the technology develops. Nevertheless, it gave us a taste of what we should expect from a topic that would increasingly affect us in the future – for if CRISPR were to become successfully refined for human safety, which is very plausible, it could become humanity’s best tool against genetic diseases and other diseases that could be eradicated either directly or indirectly through genome editing.

The 85th picture I've taken of our lab station; probably not, but I know I've taken a lot

Afterwards, we went to the lab to perform actual CRISPR, though it’s on a much smaller scale because as students, we could only work with bacteria. We dealt with E.coli once more. We finished the first part of CRISPR before we headed out for lunch, leaving off at the part of the procedure where we had to leave our samples in the heat for one to two hours. We returned after lunch to plate the samples onto plates with different dosage of antibiotics, and tomorrow we will see if we successfully inserted a gene through CRISPR that allowed for antibiotic resistance.

For the remainder of the afternoon, we continued lecture from the previous days about HIV. We discussed some more about the mechanism of HIV and were also introduced to a group of people called “elite controllers” who get infected by HIV but never progress beyond that. Though scientist are unsure how they do it, these people never develop more than the minimal amount of HIV viral particles in their bodies, so they never become sick. This is simply so very fascinating to me, and one day I want to particular in research to discover the reason behind these rarities.

One of the sciences buildings

After class, it was basically doing homework and working on the research project until dinnertime. I allowed myself a 20 minute walk around the campus after dinner, and the weather was extremely nice and cool. I just sauntered around, relaxing a bit before I returned to my dorm to continue my work.

My time in Chicago is coming to an end very soon, and all these big assignments due are just reminding me ever more about it.