Crispr and gene editing

Excellent article in Crispr in Oct 18, 2025 Globe and Mail. Crispr is the gene editing tool developed in 2012. I was surprised to find out the Crispr edited products already exist: rice, lettuce, tomatoes and probably many more have been enhanced by Crispr gene editing. Of course, the big issue is gene manipulation on animals and especially humans (yes, I know humans are animals). 

The scientific community seems to be in agreement that this is a dangerous place to go, and for the most part has stayed away. They have accepted that with this power comes responsibility. Except a certain Dr. He in China who used Crispr to edit human embryos. He was convicted of illegal medical practice and served 3 years, but is now back in the mix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair). 

 The scientific fear of gene editing is that the results can't be fully predicted. DNA is extremely complex: one snip and edit could have unknown side effects which may not be recoverable. 

 A case in point. The article ends with the case in Wuhan(yes, that Wuhan):

 'Thanks to the COVID pandemic, we now know what the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing to the genomes of bat viruses in 2015-2019 (though not using Crispr). It was hair-raising in six separate ways. They were: one, collecting bat viruses related to SARS in remote caves sometimes with inadequate protective equipment; two, bringing them thousands of miles to a city centre laboratory; three, sequencing them and culturing them in low bio-safetylevels; four. swapping their spike genes between strains to make unnatural chimeras; five, growing these chimeras in human airway epithelial cells; six, infecting the chimeras into mice with human genes, with in some cases 10,000-fold increases in infectivity. Their aim was to better predict natural pandemics, yet they were creating unnatural chimeras with human-infecting ability. 

 They were doing these experiments on the very types of virus that then did cause a pandemic, and in the very year when, and the very city where, the pandemic started: too much of a coincidence for almost all observers to believe it was chance.'* 

 * Globe and Mail - Oct 19, 2025 page O6