Yours truly, writing at NOVA Next:
While the world frets over whether CRISPR, a powerful genetic engineering technique, should be used to alter the DNA of our children, a pair of researchers in San Diego achieved something more sweeping and, according to some scientists, equally disconcerting.
In a paper published yesterday, Valentino Gantz and Ethan Bier, both at the University of California, San Diego, demonstrated the first successful implementation of a CRISPR-Cas9-based gene drive in the germ line of fruit flies. The CRISPR gene drive is a powerful piece of technology that all but guarantees an engineered trait is passed on to every single offspring. Within months or years, it has the ability to alter an entire population of a sexually reproducing species.
CRISPR-based gene drives were first posited by Kevin Esvelt and George Church last summer, when they cautioned against experiments like this. I have no doubt that this technology will be someday employed—beneficially— but we have to figure out the parameters of use first.