Introduction:
Imagine a world with no cancer, no diseases, every child born perfectly healthy, and living hundreds of years. Seems impossible, right? This will become our future with a new gene editing technique called CRISPR/Cas-9. Although humans have been altering genes and DNA for many years, CRISPR/Cas9 will prove to be one of the most important innovations in American History because it will revolutionize medical treatments, allowing us to make "perfect" designer babies, and perhaps even enabling humans to live forever.

Background:
Genetic Engineering has been an important technique for most of our modern history. Humans have been selectively breeding and domesticating animals and plants for our own purposes for millennia. By selectively …show more content…
With the understanding of the structure, scientists began knowingly adding and modifying DNA in organisms. In 1973, the first successful transplant of DNA, an antibiotic resistance gene, was moved from one bacterium to another. Just one year later, foreign DNA was transferred into mouse embryo. During this time, people were extremely worried about the future of earth's ecosystems and about human health. The Asilomar Conference of 1975 discussed the safety of genetically engineered (GE) experiments, and concluded that this work could continue with certain guidelines in place and as long as the research was extremely transparent. Just a few years later, after much testing, the first genetically modified food was authorized for sale in grocery stores: Calgene's Flavr Savr tomato. It inhibited the production of a protein that caused the tomato to rot, so the genetically modified version had a much longer shelf life. Commercial farms also began using genetically modified crops that resisted pesticides, thus allowing farmers to increase pesticide use to control weeds. Unfortunately, this also lead to an increase in pesticide resistant weeds and pests, which generated a vicious cascade of continuously stronger and stronger …show more content…
They could be used in any organism to change exact letters in the genome. ZFNs are a bunch of small proteins that can each recognize three to four letters of DNA. A large number of these proteins are attached together to recognize a specific place in the DNA. The ZFN protein complex is injected into a cell, and it attaches to the DNA and breaks the double helix in a specific place. Then, this cell repairs the damage by using another unbroken piece of DNA as a template for the broken strand. Gene editing tools including ZFNs make use of this type of repair system. Normally, the repair template used is the other chromosome, but gene editing tools can place a new template into the cell and have the cell change the DNA to the new template. This changes the target DNA in the chromosome itself! Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems using ZFNs, because they are difficult to use. ZFNs can only target certain DNA sequences: ones that have large numbers of G nucleotides, to which the zinc fingers naturally prefer to bond. Also, for each specific DNA edit, a new ZFN protein must be ordered. And, there is only one manufacturer, and cost many thousands of dollars