Question: How will CRISPR affect humanity?

Duncan McNicholl answered on 14 Nov 2017:

Okay, I have to ask: how do you know what CRISPR is?
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In terms of what it means for humanity, potentially loads, we could systematically get rid of genetic disorders without hurting anyone in the process. Also, we could make glow-in-the-dark humans like we make glow-in-the-dark rats at the moment, and who wouldn’t want that? I think we need to take care, though: we’ve found this awesome gene-editing tool at a point when we still don’t actually know all that much about how our genes work, and especially about the consequences on epigenetics that could come out of CRISPR use in the wild. The thing that scares the pants off of me, though, is the idea of a gene drive: somebody had the terrifying idea of adding the code for CRISPR itself to the DNA that CRISPR edits into a cell, so that if something changes naturally and evolution tries to revert that gene sequence then CRISPR will be made by the cell and put it back to how we designed it. It would be like CRISPR edits just happened without us doing anything, and without us being able to stop it. You’d make the change in one creature and it would spread out to the whole population, and that doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
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The other thing that I saw to do with CRISPR was interesting, though: there’s a group out there working on data storage in DNA, and it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that you could take a whole library of culture in the form of books and plays and even music and video and encode it in DNA then add that to our genome with CRISPR so that future generations had something like the Library of Alexandria in every cell of their bodies. I kinda like that one.