https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR
Cas9 (CRISPR associated protein 9)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cas9
A tool that has such power but is so relatively easy to use—and misuse—makes CRISPR a perfect example of Derrida’s pharmakon: both cure and poison, neither good nor evil, exceeding and evading such neat categorization at every turn, but not without having a profound impact on how the future will play out.
It is particularly intriguing to recall that CRISPR is essentially the product of ancient battles between two of the earliest forms of ‘life’ found on Earth: bacteria and viruses, the very organisms that we are accustomed to think of as both filthy and harmful to us. In the 1980s, Margulis and Sagan pointed out that bacteria were billions of years ahead of humanity’s cutting-edge genetic engineering in using HGT. Now, it appears that CRISPR has proved all over again that very point of Margulis and Sagan’s in the 2010s: the cutting-edge tools that put the capability of editing and rewriting other species as ‘post-species’ and ourselves as posthumans into out hands are the very ones that have been used by bacteria to repair and genetically engineer themselves for billion of years in the name of survival.
Mahon, Peter. Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed) (pp. 78-79). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle edition.
