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When the future of genetic engineering arrived on Sebastian Cocioba’s doorstep, it was affixed to the back of a postcard from Austria with a little bit of packing tape.
Cocioba is a 25-year-old college dropout whose primary interest is tinkering with plant genetics in a lab he cobbled together from eBay. The lab is located in the spare bedroom of his parent’s lavish apartment in Long Island City, across the river from Manhattan. A few months ago, an internet friend from an online bio-hacking forum had sent him the lab’s latest addition: attached to that postcard was Crispr-Cas9.
Deposited onto a flimsy fragment of filter paper and wrapped in plastic, it looked like a tab of acid. But inside that crude packaging was the key to an incredibly precise DNA-editing technology that will revolutionize the world.
Crispr—a memorable acronym for the mouthful, “clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats”—gives scientists an unprecedented ability to decrypt and reorder genes, opening up a dazzling and terrifying universe of possibilities. This year, a top national security official called gene-editing a weapon of mass...