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So I thought I'd start with this picture of, I gave a talk at a conference at Harvard a few years ago, and this was the poster for the conference.

It was kind of a cool poster, the human hands, what Aristotle called the tool of tools,

the symbol of our distinctive body form and unique capacities of mind.

And nowhere are these powers more dramatic than in our recent advances in genetic

editing, those hands are turning now to operate on our very cells.

It's clear that we're at an amazing moment in human history. Seventy years ago, Aldous Huxley

anticipating the transformation of human life

through advances in biology as the final and most searching revolution asserted this really

revolutionary revolution is to be achieved not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.

In the decades since the first publication of Brave New World,

amid the accelerating pace of discovery and genetics,

developmental biology, laboratory production of life,

there's been increasing appreciation of these prescient concerns.

Yet throughout this whole period, limitations in our tools and techniques for specific

and efficient modification of genomes have been a major constraining factor for advances

in biotechnology.

But no more.

Now, in what MIT Tech Review,

is called the biggest biotech discovery of the century,

and it may remain that too in the rest of the century,

...