These technologies all have staying power. They will affect the economy and our politics, improve medicine, or influence our culture. Some are unfolding now; others will take a decade or more to develop. But you should know about all of them right now…
Early on an unusually blustery day in June, Kevin Esvelt climbed aboard a ferry at Woods Hole, bound for Nantucket Island. Esvelt, an assistant professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on his way to present to local health officials a plan for ridding the island of one of its most persistent problems: Lyme disease. He had been up for much of the night working on his slides, and the fatigue showed. He had misaligned the buttons on his gray pin-striped shirt, and the rings around his deep-blue eyes made him look like a sandy-haired raccoon.
Esvelt, who is thirty-four, directs the “sculpting evolution” group at M.I.T., where he and his colleagues are attempting to design molecular tools capable of fundamentally altering the natural world…
According to Kazuo Ishiguro, there are three areas of science that are set to transform how we live and interact with others over the next few decades: gene editing, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI).Ishiguro, granted, is best known as one of the most celebrated fiction writers today. He is behind the novel Never Let Me Go, the story of a dystopian future where humans are cloned to be organ donors. But the possibility of a future so fundamentally changed by scientific advancements could be more than the fruit of the author’s creativity and imagination…
Source: Kazuo Ishiguro: Soon, We Will Be Able to Create Humans Who Are Superior to Other Humans
A few months ago, someone in my Facebook news feed shared an article with a title along the lines of, “You won’t believe what scientists are doing with CRISPR.” My first thought was, “What is CRISPR?”
After a bit of research, I realized just how difficult it is to get up to speed on subjects outside my area of expertise (software and startups). What are the best introductory explainers — print, video, and audio? Who are the most important thought leaders, operators, or researchers? After 30+ hours of research, I’ve learned so much, but I also wasted a lot of time filtering out low-quality derivative content…
Source: Everything You Should Know About CRISPR — And Where to Learn More – Startup Grind – Medium
Say you’ve inherited a rare genetic mutation that guarantees you’ll get a certain form of cancer by the time you reach 50 years of age.
And that this is most likely how you are going to die. But what if I told you this cancer gene, passed down from generation to generation, can be snipped out of your genome entirely and you never pass it on to any of your offspring?
That is the promise of CRISPR, which not only has the potential to radically change the genetic code of all of humanity but could also fundamentally affect our health care, food system, farming and even the manufacturing and production industries…
Source: WTF is CRISPR? | TechCrunch
ANDRÉ CRAMER 