Life as we made it

Author: Beth Shapiro

Beth Shapiro takes us through the impact that humans have had on this planet over the last 50,000 years. With the recent advances in CRISPR and other gene editing technology, humans are on the precipice of creating living creatures with any traits that one desires. This is both profound and scary at the same time. The knee jerk reaction to this is to spread fear on the unintended consequences and put the brakes on progress.

In this book Dr. Shapiro asks us to take a step back and look at the picture over a larger timescale, say 50,000 years. Humans have had a big impact in many different ways. In some cases entire species were wiped out, in others we used selective breeding to produce offspring with certain (human) desirable qualities. What we don’t readily acknowledge is that many of these activities are also meddling with the gene pool with rather coarse tools.  The fact that we are now much more precise in how we can edit genes doesn’t necessarily make it worse. Clearly, we have to be careful and have some guard rails to prevent us from creating something that endangers us and our environment.

The book walks through many large projects like creating the perfect tomato or breeding Holstein cows without horns and highlights the complicated regulatory hurdles that scientists face along the way. I have a much better appreciation for some of their challenges after reading this book.