How To Edit A Human
This story begins nearly four billion years ago, when the Earth was just another rock in just another solar system. In a pool of sludge on that rock, something astonishing happened. A long stringy molecule found a way to copy itself. Similar molecules would later carry the code that would enable life forms to grow, digest, run, breathe, read, launch rockets to the Moon. But for now, that molecule only knew how to do a single, important thing – to reproduce. This was the moment that life emerged.
Since then, as each living organism has multiplied, the codes of life have altered by the tiniest increments generation after generation, stretching across time. Most of these mutations have had little impact. Very, very occasionally, they have been extraordinarily useful. The sum of millions of minuscule modifications over billions of generations has given some organisms the ability to survive in water, land, ice or the desert. They have helped them to beat disease, to be stronger, faster, fly.
Across the aeons of biological time, this process has led one particular organism – us – to grow large brains, develop opposable thumbs and communicate complex ideas. We’ve mastered fire, tools, technology. In the great span of evolution, this transformation happened a mere split second ago. Degree by degree we continue to change.
Six years ago a group of those highly evolved organisms worked out how to shrink evolutionary time. Scientists in laboratories on either side of the Atlantic discovered a way to manipulate the blind stumblings of random mutations. Through meticulous trial after trial and not a little fortune, they found a way to edit the code of life – to tweak the information that makes our eyes blue, muscles strong or IQs high. Humans had advanced so far that we were finally able to control our own evolution.
