Lulu and Nana are twin girls - the world’s first CRISPR gene-edited children - created by Chinese clinician Dr He Jiankui.
This is the first public face of genome editing or, as it is sometimes called, gene editing: a technology capable of creating “super babies” with optimised DNA, free from disease and tweaked for perfection.
The precision offered by tools such as Crispr-Cas9 is revolutionising diagnostics, drug discovery and the treatment of single-gene diseases.
Crispr-Cas9, often shortened to Crispr, is the best-known gene-editing technology. It is a chunk of bacterial genetic code that behaves like a sat-nav, homing in on a specific location in a genome; Cas9 is a cutting enzyme that works like molecular scissors, snipping out portions of DNA. Cellular repair mechanisms then kick in, which can disable, mutate or fix the gene.
