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The prospect of influencing the course of human evolution through technological intervention has been thought about for a long time, but usually in an abstract or theoretical way. But that possibility has become an impending reality at a breathtaking pace in the past few years. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published a paper in Science in June 2012 that demonstrated that CRISPR/Cas9 (if you must know, clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats, with CRISPR associated protein 9) is a remarkably accurate and relatively easy-to-use tool for editing genes. In October Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute published a paper in Science that demonstrated that CRISPR could be used to edit mammalian genes. Soon after, George Church of Harvard published a paper demonstrating the use of CRISPR in human cells. Excitement spread quickly through the scientific community as researchers realized that this new capability opened doors to a mind-boggling array of new directions for research.
With the thrill of new possibilities came a chill of recognition that there is no guarantee that all the new uses of this technology would be benign. A group of scientists, including leaders in field such as Jennifer Doudna and a few veterans of the 1975 Asilomar Conference at which a group of scientists debated the wisdom of pursuing the possibilities opened by the development of recombinant DNA technology, met in January 2015 to discuss the potential risks associated with this new gene-editing technology. In March 2015 they published an article in Science that asked whether it would be wise to place voluntary restrictions on the use of CRISPER/Cas9 until we had a better understanding of how it might be used. They recommended that leading thinkers in science, medicine, law, ethics, and policy come together to discuss how to proceed.