2 ms·
It's not clear to me why the existence of off-target mutations with CRISPR would be worrying; random mutations naturally happen to genomes all the time, both du
by theptip 9y ago
It's not clear to me why the existence of off-target mutations with CRISPR would be worrying; random mutations naturally happen to genomes all the time, both during normal reproduction, and during selective breeding (which CRISPR could replace). As sibling comments have mentioned, the newly modified genotypes are going to be tested to make sure that any modifications were net-positive.
However, if you are worried about such mutations, you should be asking the question "does CRISPR produce more mutations than a selective breeding program?" Even if mutations are bad, CRISPR might be less bad than what we currently do (for your definition of bad).