Economic Implications

 Currently, all CRISPR has in store for the world is sky-high pricing and a greater social divide. With pricings currently over 100,000 dollars for one treatment, only the top 1% will be able to afford this life-changing (and sometimes life-saving) tool. If insurance attempts to allow everyone to get these treatments if necessary, prices for insurance will also sky-rocket. It might even become a checkbox on your insurance questionnaire (do you want us to cover genetic editing?) Vantage Blue from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island, Select Health, and VIVA Health have already shared that they will not be covering the cost of genetic therapies because of this great expense. Hopefully, insurance companies who would not be able to take the hit will  do the same thing, as a price tag this large does not spell good news for those who have to pay for it. 

A future (but feasible) method of using genetic engineering in the world would be using algae to create oil. This could not only lower the production cost of oil immensely, but also lower the price of gas and create a more bio-friendly fuel. By knocking out lipid inhibitors in the gene sequence of the algae, and depriving them of their nutrients, algae goes into a dormant stage that starts building lipids for energy storage. These lipids generate oil in some strains of algae and can be turned into a biofuel. Unfortunately, getting to this stage in the process takes a long time as algae is very old. The older something is, the more inactive genes it has. These genes, while important, get in the way when a scientist is trying to figure out what every gene does.  Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like this is going to happen anytime soon as most of the funding has been pulled from this research. 

Currently, genetic engineering is also being used to create insulin from yeast. Today, around half the world’s production of insulin comes from these yeast factories. Hopefully, this could also help solve the exorbitant price of insulin. The patent for insulin was originally sold for 1$ by Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and James Collip to allow insulin to be widely accessible.  The average price for a bottle of insulin in the UK is 8$, and in America it is 99$; the second highest country is Chile, and they sell it for only 21$. More recently, in 2023, genetic engineering has also been used to create insulin in lettuce. By placing the human genes for insulin in a lettuce, scientists were able to construct a pill (instead of an injection) from the lettuce that is able to act as an insulin injection. Hopefully this could also help bring down the price of insulin as it passes clinical trials.

Thanks to CRISPR, quick and accurate covid-19 tests have been created. These take-home-tests are very important, not only because they allow for self-diagnosis, but also because they created widespread access to testing. A take-home covid test was a huge industry during the pandemic, so if a take-home test for covid could be created, what about one for different STDs? What about a test that allows for several viruses to be looked for with one test? This has the possibility to become a huge field because not only would it decentralize testing, making it more accessible, but it would also slow the spreading of different conditions as people would have access to fast, cheap (hopefully), and accurate tests. 

Genetic engineering could also have a large impact on the workforce: because people who would have died now live, the amount of people working would increase. Genetic disorders are a leading cause of death in the US, and lack of genome sequencing among children can be credited with at least some of the deaths. Early intervention is the only ‘cure’ for genetic disorders because treatments that change the DNA that causes the disorder haven’t passed the FDA yet. CRISPR would be able to take treatments even further because it affects the cause of the condition rather than just the symptoms. This decrease in deaths, not only thanks to genome sequencing and early-intervention, but also due to genetic engineering, would lead to a more robust economy as more people enter the workforce.