Thanks very much! I hope others who know the information better will correct me and offer other perspectives.
(I forgot to mention: CRISPR works fine on humans and other animals. That's very good news for people with genetic diseases, though getting the edits into our gametes is much harder than editing DNA in body cells. I don;t think there is any standard way (yet) to repair a mutation so that the corrected genes are passed on to your children.
And the CRISPR toolkits are surprisingly cheap, and advertised online. That does raise issues of medical ethics! (Do we have an "understatement" smiley?)
I was in a heated GMO thread in DG for some months, and did some research when some very-pro-GMO people tried to blur the distinction between traditional plant breeding and modern transgenic genetic engineering.
Interestingly, some of the same people tried to blur the distinction between human-caused climate change and "weather varies form year year" and "we have Ice Ages and interglacials all the time, what's the big deal".
In one case, they wanted to Trust The GMO Scientists because it let agribusiness increase profits (and create crops that were more efficient, at least for some years or decades). Int he other case, "97% of Climate 'Scientists' Are Just Government-Sponsored Liars" because limiting CO2 emissions is bound to cut into profits.
