The ABCs of Biotech for Christians - Fourth in a series - C is for CRISPR-Cas9
Perhaps you have seen or remember from the childhood the movie, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959, 2008). Explorers venture into a cavern and descend to discover places of strange beauty and creatures. Likewise, through instruments of nanotechnology scientists voyage into worlds of fantastic landscapes that are our under-being: DNA, cells, molecules, bacteria, more. Thus they can see the patterns that program human growth, development, functioning and reproduction.
The CRISPR— Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats— of DNA, represent sections of instructions that can be edited. CRISPR-Cas9 is the name for a relatively new biotechnology that can precisely edit DNA. It shows promise for healing diseases, but also for altering human genetic makeup so that “designer” babies could be engineered, among other eugenics goals.
Christians need to understand such biotechnologies that are unfolding at warp speed. Here are some resources that can help.
The below 30-min video is a TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talk by Dr. Paul Knoepfler who explains how CRISPR could disrupt society. He believes there should be a moratorium on the new technology. He reports that human genetic modification has officially begun in the United Kingdom and that scientists the world over are excited about CRISPR.
This 16-minute video has been viewed nearly 29 million times, which tells us it is worth seeing. It describes a brief history of genetic engineering and what can occur in the near and less near future.
This video is a little over four minutes and focuses on CRISPR-Cas9.
This article describes the effort to discourage germline genome modification through CRISPR-Cas9, which is performed on embryos. Such editing of genes would permanently alter the human genome.
The scientists credited with discovering CRISPR-Cas9 are shown here, with one explaining the biotechnology.
This movie trailer says these things are happening!
This article explains how human embryos have already been GMed. A CRISPR timeline describes its advance since 1987. A lead scientist advises that humans not be subject to CRISPR-Cas9.
Christians might wonder: When a human being is genetically altered, how would that affect the soul? Will the message of salvation make sense to a human who has been made king-like, even king-sized, by CRISPR-Cas9?
Discarding embryos in the process of inventing a designer baby may seem unimportant to an evolutionist who believes that God himself discarded multitudes of creatures before finally coming up with a human. But for the Bible-believing Christian, an embryo is a human being deserving of respect, for life begins at conception. We are opposed to experimentation that destroys embryos. The fact that life begins at conception is the scientific view which is still in the textbooks, however today it is challenged in courts and academia regularly.
Man was made in God’s image for relationship and enjoyment. Will God enjoy relating to humans made in the image of the world’s value system when he has said, “Love not the world”? (1 John 2:15) And what about introducing genetic material from one organism into another for experimentation? Should man intermix the kinds created by God? Again, for most scientists, blending the kinds is permissible since that is the history of man’s evolution. The stage has been set for the assault on God’s wondrous creation.