One Man's Plan to Make Sure Gene Editing Doesn't Go Haywire
It’s summer, which means that it’s also tick season. Through their bites, these bloodsuckers pick up the bacteria that cause Lyme disease from white-footed mice and then spread those microbes to people. They do so with particular verve on the island of Nantucket, Mass., where almost 40 percent of people have suffered through the rashes, fevers, and pain of Lyme.
For those beleaguered islanders, Kevin Esvelt has an offer.
Esvelt, an evolutionary biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wants permission to stop Lyme disease by genetically engineering white-footed mice to vaccinate them against Lyme. He’d start by injecting captive mice with either a protein found on the Lyme bacteria, or one in the saliva of ticks. Some of those rodents would develop antibodies against these proteins, becoming immune. Esvelt would identify the genes that produce those antibodies and transfer them into the genomes of mice that haven’t encountered Lyme, using the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR.
In doing so, he’d create a lineage of rodents that would be naturally vaccinated against Lyme from birth. Any tick that bites them would fall off and die. Any Lyme bacterium that infiltrates
