Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?

OK, just an incremental improvement over lcd, oled, e-paper etc, but the characteristics enable deployment in many new situations. Plus it's a "why didn't I think of that?" technology. https://www.clearinkdisplays.com/technology

CRISPR. The ability to edit DNA in living animals (especially in the germ line) will cure genetic diseases, make us live longer, and increase our ability to feed the third world.

CRISPR-CAS9 for genome editing. Briefly, it allows us to identify particular bits of DNA and modify one or more bases. It's a very new biotechnology (research essentially began within the last 10 years) which applies to essentially all species we've tested it on. It is cheap and so easy to perform that I could probably teach 99% of HN to do it in a week's training or less.

It's still not as accurate as we need it to be, but that won't stop biologists from modifying plants for improved performance as crops, bugs for less disease spreading, or other mammals to increase the pace of biological discovery. In time (and in China first, most likely), we will see the use of this genome-editing technology on humans flourish.

Thinking specifically of humans, it will allow us to eradicate inherited genetic diseases like sickle-cell anemia, to target cancer cells very specifically, and will hopefully revolutionize treatment in many sorts of diseases. Now, when it comes to enhancing humans and their germ-line (eggs/sperm), which allows enhancement on down the generations. this is the most controversial point. It will probably be done on the black market if we try to regulate it, and it would probably be immoral to disallow people from giving their children all the advantages possible.

But where does that stop? Do we allow a bunch of 6'5" mega-geniuses with blonde hair, blue eyes, and all the right genotypes to take over society? Will that occur? Who's to say. Either way, utopian or dystopian or somewhere in between, I think genome editing is the most influential class of technologies on the horizon.

As someone not in biotech at all, biotech is so cool to me in general. Definitely a the sexiest field as an outsider for me.