Noa U. Gen-ethics

[Gen-ethics]

Noa U.

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats Guide RNA can now target and find a sequence Like a sniper of genetic bases slyly circling around a double helix Our sights aimed at any weakness We laugh holding the strength to cut and reform With shiny badges claiming we could single handedly erase diseases

What wishful thinking No warnings on this box Offering up any changes that they want Just wait and see how much money they’ll drop

Yes, that Achilles heel Sometimes eyes painted with greed and filled with treasure try to steal A little too much Turning base metals to gold has a certain appeal But we all know chemistry was the new alchemy After alchemy was deemed something to throw in the fire Now only our history is immortal In essence, each of our ideas seem to have a secret half-life making them expire

Next example, take cheetahs Seemingly unremarkable but one look at their DNA And you’d wonder if their sequences were repeated This is because they’re all so similar Take a skin graft from one and it works on any other cause the code is quite familiar

But they hold their building blocks too tightly Balancing upon the edge of evolution oh so lightly This is one place where you’ll fall apart by sticking together For if disease conquers one then who’s the one left looking clever All the cheaters are going down tethered To their perfect genetics Now does that sound like something you’ve heard before

Imagine pathogens feeding on spotted yellow cats and their Vibrant ruffled fur growing bleached under the skeletal stacks The merciless sun glares down Not met with a single outlier Not one oddball with a unique chance to overcome We need abnormalities in order to be the survivors

So perfect mind and eyes and hair Perfect health and health to spare All this striving for control We design our children how we want them to grow We bend them to our own will Sleep easy knowing they won’t resist they’ll swallow our pills We raise hungry fists building walls to keep out But with every bridge we build a prison And on the inside is what we hoped a force to reroute

At last from humans we mapped our genes Forgetting corn and sidewalk weeds And with these maps we reach a new branch of life We design perfection first Then we design war and endless opportunities A basis for knife and spoon fights All this because of an microscopic enzyme called Cas9 Hasn’t anyone remembered The way we tried to wipe out so called lower life These molecular scissors soon will hit the ground at a run Sprinting faster than a cheetah

Faster than a chemical reaction Faster than any ray from the heat of the sun Quicker than a bolt of lightning Into the actions that can’t be undone Isn’t evolution frightening? Are we prepared for what we will become?