This is KZSU, Stanford.

Welcome to Entitled Opinions.

My name is Robert Harrison.

We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.

I know. Here we go with another new show, our penultimate one of this season.

We will be airing one more in a few days on Henry David Thoreau to celebrate his 200th birthday on July 12th, after which, entitled opinions, will go on hiatus for a while.

We've covered a variety of topics this season, everything from Donald Trump to the singularity,

from drugs in literature to the great albums of 1967,

and most recently a show with Eric McLuhan on Marshall McLuhan.

Today we're going to broach a topic that should induce fear and trembling in all of us.

I'm referring to new gene editing technologies,

and in particular to CRISPR CAS9,

which is the most consequential biotech discovery of our times.

CRISPR stands for clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats.

It was co-invented by Jennifer Dowdna from Berkeley and Emmanuel Charpentier from France.

It represents, to put it mildly, a huge game changer for life on Earth.

CRISPR promises easy to do, inexpensive, highly precise genetic deletions, insertions, and functional manipulations of genomic processes all across the spectrum of living beings.

This is the kind of technology that would have horrified Hannah Arendt,

who 60 years ago warned us about the dangers of acting into nature,

by which he meant provoking natural effects and processes that nature itself would never have brought about on its own.

Arant was thinking in particular about nuclear fission, but now, with CRISPR Kass9, we're talking about acting into the genetic makeup of life itself.

When we act into nature, either by splitting the atom or modifying the genome of living species, no one, and I mean no one, can promise in advance that it's all going to be fine.

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