Genome editing is powerful tool: can reshape medical treatments and people’s lives, but it can also harmfully reduce human diversity. What do you think about?

After decades of false starts, scientists are beginning to believe that modified organs from animals can help solve the global shortage. Xenotransplantation — replacing human organs with those from other species, typically referred to as “xeno” by scientists — has followed cycles of hope and disappointment dating back at least to 1984 when surgeons in California gave Baby Fae, born with a lethal cardiac defect, a baboon’s heart which failed after three weeks. Now, after decades of anticipation, a new era of medical innovation could be within grasp, propelled by advances in gene editing, including Crispr technology, animal cloning and immunology. At the same time fears that transplants could transfer viruses from animals to humans, which almost killed xeno research in the late 1990s, have eased.
We know now this extraordinary facet of the immune system is its ability to discriminate between our own proteins and the proteins made by bacteria, viruses and fungi — between ‘self’ and ‘not-self’.