On Friday, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a sickle cell disease drug called Casgevy, co-developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics.
It’s the first gene editing treatment to be approved in the US. CRISPR (which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology has been in development for cancer and sickle cell treatment for years. But it wasn’t long ago that gene editing seemed like science fiction.
Concerns of designer babies and “fixing” people deemed genetically inferior are not unfounded — if humans are good at one thing, it’s abusing technology — but the reality of the research has been that it focuses on curing conditions that cause pain, suffering and early death.
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