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The scientific community is aghast at the prospect of gene editing to create “designer” humans. Gene editing may be of greater consequence than climate change, or even the consequences of unleashing the energy of the atom.

CRISPR is an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. This is the immune system that bacteria developed to protect themselves from infections by bacteriophages — the most abundant life form on the planet.

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Bacteriophages were discovered in Paris by Felix d’Herelle at the Pasteur Institute in 1917. He was studying a subset of patients spontaneously recovering from dysentery. D’Herelle proposed that an antimicrobe smaller than any known life form had killed the bacteria in infected patients. He demonstrated conclusively the existence of this new life form, and named them bacteriophages: viruses that attack bacteria.

The bacteriophage has been studied intensely: its beauty was revealed with the electron microscope, and its genome was the first life form sequenced.