Argumentative Essay On Crispr

(1) The news the doctor brings affirms a family their worst thoughts. It’s malignant, and it has become untreatable. As of this moment, there is no cure for cancer; it’s often recognized as a death sentence. Cancer is caused by a genetic mutation in a cell, causing it to divide uncontrollably. Not only cancer, but multiple diseases are genetic, fatal, and incurable. Examples of which include HIV, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, and many others. Due to this, the question becomes, “Are there safe therapies for correcting genetic mutations?” Ten years ago, the answer would have been a resounding, “No.” However, since the discovery and years of research with CRISPR, correcting genetic mutations is now a reality. Initially, this may seem like a medical miracle. A cure for cancer, HIV, and other genetic disorders? How would one even receive genetic treatment with CRISPR, more scientifically recognized as CRISPR-Cas9? In the United States, you won’t. All genetic therapies are regulated by the FDA, and despite having the technology to perform therapy trials, the FDA has not begun to start human trials …show more content…
CRISPR stands for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats” (Saey, Tina Hesman.) It may not mean much to the average human, however, it’s the hallmark of any bacterial defense system (“Questions and Answers about CRISPR.”). When select bacteria survive attacks by viruses, they save a portion of the virus’s DNA in an archive called CRISPR. This archive not only stores a portion of the virus’s DNA, it scans every piece of DNA it can find until it finds a genetic match to the virus DNA it saved. Once CRISPR locates a long sequence of DNA that matches the one of the virus the bacteria was attacked by, an enzyme called Cas9 cuts the DNA, making it useless. Core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Feng Zhang has worked with significantly with CRISPR-Cas9. In his words he describes the CRISPR system as