In 1990, Herman the Bull was born in Leiden, the Netherlands. He was the first transgenic bovine, having been micro-injected with human embryonic cells with the gene coding for lactoferrin. This allowed the bull’s female offspring to produce the human milk protein in its own milk, which could then be extracted. Since then, a large…
In the film Gattacca, parents use genetic selection techniques to create the baby that they want, and typically, parents choose the embryo with the most physically fit characteristics [1]. The techniques present in this 1997 film are nearly at our fingertips in an even more revolutionary form. Our ability to pick and choose specific traits…
Our brain is extremely powerful and capable of carrying out many complex tasks. But the amount of information that we can process at any given time certainly has its limitations. Modern day neuroscience may have made it possible to increase the raw accessible power of our brains with the use of some remarkable drugs. In…
Last April, a group of geneticists at Sun Yat-sen University in China published a paper describing their attempt to alter the genomes of human embryos using CRISPR-Cas9, a powerful new gene editing technology. The embryos possessed mutant copies of beta-globin, a gene that normally helps produce hemoglobin but in its mutant form causes beta-thalassemia, a…