Gene-edited microbiomes, and Google’s Canadian standoff
Microbes are everywhere, and the ones in our bodies appear to be incredibly important for our health. They’ve developed intricate relationships with other living systems, feeding on chemicals in their environments to produce other chemicals—some of which are more beneficial to nearby organisms than others. Getting microbes to work for us has been a tantalizing prospect to scientists for decades. Can we tweak the genomes of these microbes to control exactly which chemicals they break down or produce, for example? What if…