CRISPR-Cas

 "Over the past few decades, scientists have studied this enzyme bacteria used to recognize viruses and just cut them apart. It is wild how this works. So bacteria, they fight off viruses by snatching fragments of the virus’s own DNA and then loading these sequences into these enzymes. And these sequences they then program the enzymes to patrol the cell looking for a viral match, like looking for that virus again. And when it finds it, the enzyme cuts the viral DNA and saves a cell from infection.

But here’s the thing that won Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2020. They figured out, along with many, many other scientists, how to code these enzymes with whatever genetic sequence we want, and then we can quite easily make these incredibly precise cuts wherever that sequence is located, and we can actually replace that sequence. We can replace it with new genetic information of our choice.

We can make these very precise edits in genetic code and not just our code but the code of mice, of plants, of pigs, of mosquitoes, of other living creatures. We’re learning how to take control of not just human evolution but arguably every species’ evolution with a precision we have never had before. And now we’re about to enter the age of the genetic revolution where the code of life, the genetic code will replace the digital code as being the core thing we’re going to program, and we’ll be programming molecules, not just microchips."