Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/31/a-biologist-explains-crispr-in.html
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All I want to know is how soon I can get my giant talking GMO wolf I can ride through the woods on and put on the phone to scare telemarketers.
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I just want a fix for my crippling seasonal allergies, maybe a nudge towards a ‘mesomorph’ body type instead of my current ‘endomorph’ leanings while we’re at it 
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If you then watch the video backwards, you have “Flowers for Algernon”.
Seems like the amount of detail around the topic gets more attention the older you get, not the detail of the thing itself.
Right. I would have liked to hear actually more-in-depth explanations of CRISPR — i.e. what it is, how it works — not just higher-level talk about ethics with people who already know about CRISPR. I didn’t learn anything about CRISPR that I didn’t already know: something magically finds a sequence of bases, cuts there, and inserts something new. I was hoping that one of the levels of complexity would be somewhere around my level, so I could actually learn more about CRISPR.
It’s a great concept, it just needs a little bit of work.
It would be great if the final “experts” were people with a solid grasp of the subject related to the topic (e.g., in this case, DNA and traditional methods of gene splicing) but who didn’t know CRISPR itself, so he could explain it to them.
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What matters is this tech will become much cheaper and more widespread. international surveys also show massive cultural differences in public attitudes. This means that regardless of what one culture decides, others will be forced to adoption for using these for eugenic purposes or be out-competed by directed evolution.
Ie if Europeans are very reticent, Americans are somewhat reticent but Chinese are even less reticent about using CRISPER and other tech to hack evolution and move it to its next stage, it is the least reticent who win the argument.
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