CRISPR technology represents a breakthrough technology in the field of genetic engineering, which will have significant effects in the field of Biological Weapons development. NATO must react to, and prepare for, this situation. It should do this by providing a forum for the discussion of CRISPR-related security issues for member-states, as well as promoting diologue on CRISPR technology with non-NATO states such as China.
Developments in genetic science have delivered real changes in the fields of healthcare and crop and food production over the past century. The recent development of a new technology within this field, CRISPR-Cas, makes it highly likely that the impact of genetic engineering on human societies is set to accelerate, deepen and extend into new fields of activity.
CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. It refers to a specific DNA sequence found to repeat at regular intervals within the overall DNA sequences of approximately 40% of bacterial species. In bacteria, CRISPR-Cas systems function as an active immune defense system. However, scientists have recently found ways of using the CRISPR-Cas system to edit any DNA material. The CRISPR-Cas system is already being used to create gene-edited plants and animals for commercial use, such as de-horned cattle and disease-resistant chickens. In the next longer-term we will develop potentially the synthesis of entirely "new" organisms – organisms designed from scratch, from the DNA-up.
Beware of those CRISPR critters. To read more, click here.