Altering the genome of an already developed organism, that is as opposed to an egg-cell or an embryo, is, I suppose, much more difficult. It may be possible th

Altering the genome of an already developed organism, that is as opposed to an egg-cell or an embryo, is, I suppose, much more difficult. It may be possible though, and if so, it does represent tremendous therapeutic possibilities, but in the grand scheme of things, I believe it's less important than the possibility of editing organisms "from scratch", that is immediately after fecundation (or even before, as I recall an article about using gene editing on sperm cells [1]). Therapeutic prospects matter to us from a selfish, subjective point of view but from an objective, anthropological point of view, the idea that we could create organisms with an arbitrary genome is much more significant. 1. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/543541/how-to-really-engineer-a-human-baby/ http://www.technologyreview.com/news/543541/how-to-really-en...