Hacking the code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures

By Nessa Carey

Released : 12 / 09 / 2021

Reviewed : 28 / 08 / 2021

Reviewed by: Mandaly Sagolsem

For 45 years Gene Modification (GM) has been with the world, however with little interest. Even though some traditional system has successfully manipulated some of the organisms to give more of what we need, like vitamins in rice preventing millions from going blind, transgenic farm animals produce drugs in their milk making the expensive drugs more affordable to many more. Decades went by, until a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui from Southern University of Science and Technology in Guangdong Province, China, shocked the world with his announcement in 2018, that his team has created a gene edited twins using the new tool, CRISPR, eight years after the system is being invented by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, in 2012. What is special about the twins is that Dr He edited a gene that responded to HIV-1 while they were just an embryo (He adapted in vitro fertilization), later he implanted them in their biological mother. This means that the mutated gene will pass on to generations.

Nessa Carey in Hacking the code of life: How gene editing will rewrite our future, focuses mainly on how the gene editing was in the early days, how it evolved through times and how it can change and alter our genetic material not only in future but also in present too. She makes this small book ( only with 181 pages) reachable to anyone, even a reader without a genetics or biology background could understand it. 

She depicts the two possible applications of the tool; One is the fear of unethical applications like making super humans in just 5 to 10 years and the other is the advantage of the speed and ease of the tool in editing of plants, animals genetic materials that can improve in producing more yields, disease resistant plants and livestock, producing more milk and meat; and in development of drugs which are difficult or expensive to synthesize in a lab. Gene editing can save people from inheriting lethal genetic disorder by just removing the mutation that causes it.

Nessa showed her fear about who could control the application of this tool because it makes \’biohacking\’ possible. The book is all about the applications and both ethical and unethical questions that arise after the tool makes it possible to manipulate any organisms on earth.

(\’Hacking the code of Life\’ is a thriller with a lot of unanswered questions from the author)