Introduction: Biolegality as Critical Intervention

In 2012, microbiologists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna made a discovery that would usher into existence the world of gene editing. They had discovered how an enzyme (Cas9) in combination with CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats)—a bacterial immune system—could cleave to specific parts of DNA, demonstrating this system can be adapted to make targeted cuts in a genome, modifying a DNA sequence.