The Genetically Engineered War
Posted April 26, 2020
Gareth Rice
There’s a new frontier of science that is having far reaching implications for the world. Gene editing, more commonly known by its new technique CRISPR, has the potential to change the food we eat, the plants we grow, the pets we keep and, more pressingly, it now has the potential to change the wars we fight. Unsurprisingly then, its use has profound national security implications, leading the U.S. Government to declare it a weapon of mass destruction in 2016.
So, does CRISPR have the potential to change war as we know it? The short answer is yes, because it also has the potential to change human life as we know it. Genes are the fundamental code of life. Mapping them allows us to understand how our bodies work and, more importantly, how to alter them. Long before CRISPR (an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) was discovered, we have used selective breeding to manipulate these genes in a variety of applications for animals. The Nazi Lebensborn program provides one horrifying example of such attempts at eugenics in humans.
https://groundedcuriosity.com/the-genetically-engineered-war/#.XqY0UZl7kuU
