The premier episode of the fourth season of HBO's mini-documentary series Vice will include a segment on genetic engineering that examines what researchers and doctors around the world have achieved with technologies like CRISPR. Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats is a gene-editing tool that has made genetic modification so inexpensive and precise that new research papers about its applications seem to be published daily.

A related field is preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD. Though PGD doesn't actually involve editing genomes, it is widely used around the world to allow parents to select some of the traits of their children, such as gender and eye color. Doctor Jeffrey Steinberg of Fertility Institutes offers these services in the United States, and thousands of couples in China wait in line for hours to meet with fertility doctors that offer PGD.

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The process works by extracting somewhere around a dozen eggs from the mother and using in vitro fertilization (INV) to fertilize the eggs with the father's sperm. Once the eggs are fertilized, doctors can analyze the genomes of the embryos and tell the parents if the baby would be at risk of genetic diseases as well as what gender they will be and what eye color they will have. The parents simply select one of the embryos with their preferred traits and have it reinserted into the mother's womb.

Gene editing, meanwhile, works by injecting a protein into an organism to actually cut part of its genome out and replace it with new genes. CRISPR is the most widely used method of editing genomes, and hundreds of experiments using CRISPR on animals and plants have already been conducted. For example, a group of researchers in Campinas, Brazil, has genetically modified a species of mosquito that carries dengue fever with a protein that will kill them before they reach maturity. Millions of modified mosquitoes have been released in an attempt to wipe out the species.

CRISPR and related technologies have the potential to eradicate previously incurable diseases such as cancer and diabetes—some speculate that gene editing could even be used to deter aging. The United Kingdom recently approved using CRISPR to edit human embryos, something that is still prohibited in the United States. But we are talking about taking the evolution of the human race into our own hands, a frightening prospect to many.

Tune in to HBO tonight at 11:00 pm ET/PT to learn more about the genetic technologies that are poised to change the course of history.

Source: HBO

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