Asif Uddin     

Professor Hunter

English 21003

4 October 2020

Genetic Engineering has been revolutionizing life for decades. According to “Genetically Modified Humans: The X-Men of scientific research” by Jenny Straiton, Since the 1970’s genetic engineering has been used to create the first transgenic organism which is an antibiotic resistant Escherichia Coli bacteria. This was later followed by the first genetically engineered animal, which was a mouse. Ever since then, genetic engineering has been used across hundreds of biological organisms to genetically change them and create long term benefits to them such as creating bacteria that can break down crude oil, or increase the shelf life of tomatoes. The downside of all this? It took up to almost a full year to fully complete each experiment. This led to genetic engineering to become very time consuming and extremely expensive to conduct. But all this changed with the introduction of CRISPR. As discussed in this video, “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAhjPd4uNFY”, CRISPR, which is short for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, is an advanced piece of technology that revolutionized genetic engineering since 2012, It has cut the time to genetically engineer something from a year to just a mere few weeks, and this has led to costs being cut by 99 percent. But what exactly is CRISPR? CRISPR is basically a replication of the Cas9 protein, which cuts DNA that has been affected by viruses and bacteria in order to protect the person from diseases and illnesses. Scientists discovered that they can control this Cas9 protein and have it delete and change any part of a DNA they wanted to, hence CRISPR was invented. The video “Genetic Engineering Will Change Everything Forever – CRISPR”, engages their audience with a variety of  visuals and animations to visually show exactly what they are talking about. They are extremely creative with hey they show their visuals, for example, when they were discussing the fact that the creation of CRISPR cut cost and time tremendously, they visually showed it by showing coins dropping with a red arrow, and a clock with a red arrow going down.