I once got into a debate with a classmate in undergrad. He had seen a Ted Talk and was very worried that CRISPR was going to create a new race of designer babie

I once got into a debate with a classmate in undergrad. He had seen a Ted Talk and was very worried that CRISPR was going to create a new race of designer babies. I tried to explain that even CRISPR wasn't there yet, but he was under the common misconception that CRISPR is just a text editor for the genome [1]. If we want to take the computer code analogy, CRISPR is not vim/emacs/nano/ect., it is sed -i 's///g' with greedy options on. The 'g' option is what got the researchers here. I hypothesize that a future problem will be CRISPR targeting previous CRISPR edits since the targets are relatively conserved. [1]: https://xkcd.com/1823/ https://xkcd.com/1823/