I’m taking a breather from writing about what seems to be the world’s most disruptive new regulation (GDPR) to inform our readers about it’s most disruptive new technology.
I’m referring to “CRISPR” – also known as the world’s most disruptive (and scarily under-regulated) new technology no one is talking about.
What’s CRISPR?
No, it’s not a better way to manufacture potato chips or prepare a salad.
CRISPR, which stands for (inhale now) “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” is a new biotech tool used by scientists to edit human DNA. It’s poised to be our greatest medical breakthrough: a scientifically proven and repeatable method to conduct gene “editing.”
Lets put this in terms our lawyer audience will understand.
Think of the human genome as the civil procedure textbook from your 1L year of law school. Each word is a gene, controlling for some human characteristic like eye color, intellectual aptitude or an affinity for ice-cold caffeinated beverages. CRISPR lets you modify any single word in the textbook, replacing it with another, changing the characteristic.
It’s also called “genomic surgery,” and its benefits range from curing diseases like cancer and HIV/AIDS, to eradicating global poverty through the advent of enhancements to agriculture products and farm animals, as recently proposed by Bill Gates.
Is this really the future?
Thanks to CRISPR, there’s now deadly serious discussions about the costs and benefits of doing things like bringing back wooly mammoths and Neanderthals, or possibly introducing into the world more practical beasts like “heavily muscled pigs,” “hornless cattle,” or infertile mosquitos incapable of spreading disease.
The benefits are dreamy, but the potential costs are a nightmare at global scale. Experts believe poorly regulated CRISPR technology could result in catastrophic biological and ecological harm. For example, bad actors could intentionally weaponize CRISPR, ushering in a new age of bioterror. Misguided labs could accidentally produce a “species-ending” gene drive. There’s also the century old problem of eugenics and ethical issues surrounding “designer babies.”
To put it bluntly, the risk of getting CRISPR wrong could be game over for mankind.
From Designer Yogurt to Designer Babies
CRISPR may be new technology, but it’s biological “backend” is as old as bacteria.
Inadvertently discovered by yogurt engineers working for a Danish food company (one of whom, Jennifer Doudna, recently published a memoir on her discovery and its implications), was the fact that certain species of bacteria used a natural defense mechanism against invading viruses called “Cas9”. It was observed to literally “slice” the DNA of viral invaders with yet unseen surgical precision.
In 2012, Doudna’s team published an article in Science demonstrating how this process could be “programmed” by scientists. It shook the medical world. Pulitzer Prize winning author of “The Gene: An Intimate History,” Siddhartha Mukherjee, said of the discovery “only a handful of such instances of scientific serendipity have occurred in the history of biology.” Nobel Prize winning American biologist Craig Mello put it this way:
“CRISPR is absolutely huge…It’s one of those things that you have to see to believe. I read the scientific papers like everyone else, but when I saw it working in my own lab, my jaw dropped. A total novice in my lab got it to work.”
Why Most Lawyers Aren’t Yet Talking About CRISPR
Given the obviously high stakes, why aren’t more lawyers talking about CRISPR?
Aside from the obvious fact that lawyers are paid to know about laws like GDPR, and medical doctors are paid to know about practices, like CRISPR, there are a few significant reasons.
To start, CRISPR remains vastly under-regulated. We do not yet have a coordinated national or international regulatory framework to ensure the safe and ethical testing of CRISPR-based therapies. While a handful of international and forward-thinking interest groups have established technical norms and frameworks, the current regulatory gap means research will continue to be driven by unwatched private and state actors operating out of the legal sphere.
This, combined with the fact that we are talking about a relatively low-cost process compared to other technologies, increases the likelihood we will get this one wrong in the short term. The cost of our collective lawyer ignorance is, therefore, considerable when it comes to CRISPR.
Another has to do with a “skills gap” (more like a chasm) perpetuated by an antiquated legal education system. It’s hard to issue spot the legal problems within complex technologies like CRISPR, or GDPR for that matter, if law students are not equipped with vital cross-disciplinary knowledge and skills. In the case of GDPR, the supply of lawyers capable of actually solving complex data processing legal issues, which involve a degree of technical fluency, does not meet current demand. The same goes for CRISPR.
A third reason lawyers aren’t talking about CRISPR is our continued lag in legal technology adoption. We’re still way too “heads down” in legal drudgery to have a “heads up” on this potentially species-ending technology. By failing to incorporate the tools that will help lawyers automate non-creative tasks, such as document drafting, review of low-complexity transactions, and document management, we continue to waste precious hours on administrative tasks with no real global impact.
It’s high time we automate the boring to address the big. Increasing legal technology adoption will unleash the bandwidth required to meet the enormous legal challenges posed by CRIPSR-like technologies.
Lawyers Are Humans Too
We at Evolve the Law are laser-focused on legal technology. We are also monitoring and reporting on technology that will upend the legal system. CRISPR is just one glaring example. It’s an important reminder that the purpose of our profession goes beyond merely serving as a transactional cog in the wheel of the global economy. At times like this, we have a civic duty to think beyond internal improvements and improve the external globe itself.
At the end of the day, lawyers are human beings too. We should have a say in the future of humanity, as well as the future of law.
That’s why CRISPR matters.
Ian Connett, Esq. (@QuantumJurist) is the Founder of QuantumJurist, Inc., a LegalTech consulting and technology venture dedicated to improving and creating efficiencies in the legal services industry. Ian is also a Contributing Editor to the EvolveTheLaw.com Legal Innovation Center and Host of the EvolveLaw Podcast. Ian resides in New York, where he has served as an in-house counsel to numerous technology companies. You can connect with Ian on Twitter and LinkedIn and you can reach him by email at [email protected] (for story ideas, personal correspondence, media inquires or speaking engagements).
