The Xenobot Future Is Coming--Start Planning Now

In July 2017, I sat in on a closed-door meeting coordinated by the State Department and the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. In the room were research scientists, government officials, and policy wonks with PhDs in the hard sciences. Our task that day was to talk about the future of Crispr-Cas9. Back then, the public wasn't yet aware of this powerful genetic editing tool, but today you probably know it as the set of "molecular scissors" that use biological processes to cut and paste genetic information. Crispr might be new, but the key points of our conversation were hardly original.