Five minutes of walking around in the park with my boyfriend, and we had already attracted the stares of half a dozen people. You'd think they'd have become accustomed to boys holding hands—same-sex marriage was legalized in the US four years ago. But unfortunately some mindsets towards gay people still haven't changed.

Cecil, my boyfriend, manages to ignore the homophobes. He usually does this by telling me some fascinating story he heard on a science podcast.

"I am addicted to science podcasts," he once told me. "Actually, no—I'm addicted to science itself."

Today, the topic was genetics.

"So, you've heard of CRISPR, right?" Cecil asked me eagerly.

"Uh... no," I admitted.

He made a disappointed grunt. "Come on, David, don't you EVER listen to the news?"

"Not a lot. But come on, tell me—what's CRISPR? It isn't, like, a type of potato chip, is it?"

"No way!" cried Cecil. "It stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats."

"Which in English means...?"

"Well, some bacteria have virus DNA in them—"

"Wait, what? This is about bacteria all of a sudden?"

Cecil sighed. "The bacteria store virus DNA in their own genome so that they can tell which viruses are harmful to them. When they meet a virus, they send out enzymes to check if its DNA matches what they have stored. If it does, that means the virus is dangerous, and so the enzymes cut up its DNA."

This didn't exactly make a lot of sense to me, but I nodded and smiled. "Um... okay then. But you said we were going to talk about deep moral issues."

"We are!" Cecil protested. "Bear with me. So, scientists have figured out that they can take this enzyme, program DNA into it, send it into a cell, and it will snip the DNA in EXACTLY the way they want it. Now do you get it?"

"Is it...." A light dawned in my brain. "Hang on... you're saying scientists can edit DNA."

"YES! And it's even easier and cheaper to do it than ever before! Isn't that awesome??"

Cecil looked so excited; I didn't want to ruin his mood. "But... but that means they can do weird things to our bodies...."

He waved this thought away. "You've been watching too much Doctor Who. We won't be able to turn people into mutants for a long time. But what we CAN do is even better."

"And what can we do?"

"We can eliminate genetic disorders!" sang Cecil. "Take hemophilia, for example."

"The one that makes you bleed a lot? 'Cause your body can't, like, seal cuts and stuff?"

"Exactly. So, that's a genetic mutation which is only affected by one gene. But if we could take that gene out...." Cecil spread his hands, looking at me expectantly.

"Well...." I thought about it. "If someone were to remove—"

"Replace, actually."

"Fine, then. If someone were to replace the hemophilia gene with the regular gene, that would mean: 1. the person wouldn't have hemophilia, and 2. their offspring wouldn't have hemophilia, because they'd pass the good gene on to them."

"So...?"

"So no more hemophilia. But... you're saying we now have the technology to do this?"

"Even better!" Cecil cried. "We HAVE done it! Scientists in China managed to take a reproductive cell with the gene for hemophilia, and use CRISPR to replace the bad gene!"

"So they've done it."

"Yep!"

"And it works?"

"It works perfectly!"

"Well." I wasn't exactly sure how I should react. Was this a good thing? Certainly. But then again, it was tampering with someone's genome—their DNA—without permission.

Cecil must have seen the hesitation on my face. "What's the matter?"

"Do we have the right to do that?"

"Ah." He smiled. "See, that's where the deep moral issues come in. I say we do—if it's hemophilia. Because who wants hemophilia?"

"Yeah... I suppose I agree with you on that. But what if it's something else?"

"Like what? Cystic fibrosis?"

"No, like not a disease. Like...." Then a thought occurred to me.

I may not read science magazines like Cecil, but I do like to keep up with the rest of the LGBTQ community. Lots of homophobes say that "being gay is a choice". My friends and I would always respond that it wasn't, and it would turn into a fight with neither side having any evidence. But, as of a couple weeks ago, there now is.

For a while, scientists had been looking for a "gay gene". In 2014, there was proof that one cluster of genes, Xq28, determined sexual orientation. Now, after 5 years of fact-checking and careful studying, they are 100% sure: there are, in fact, genes that decide whether you're gay, straight, bisexual, asexual, or anything in between.

"Cecil..." I said slowly, "have you heard of the 'gay gene'?"

"Xq28? Of course! It's awesome! Now we can prove that we—"

I interrupted. "If CRISPR can really modify DNA—"

"It can," he assured me.

"Well... then now being gay IS a choice."

Cecil's eyebrows went down, then up very suddenly. "Oh gosh. People could edit someone's genes to make them straight."

We were both very quiet for a second. I imagined, with rising horror, a future in which parents could choose the sexuality of their child. They'd undoubtedly choose for them to be straight—even if they supported gay rights, what parent wants their child to endure homophobia and prejudice? Any orientation other than straight would soon be non-existent, and those who didn't have their genes edited would be all alone....

"But surely," I said aloud, "some people won't want to change their child's sexuality."

Cecil suddenly grinned. "Hey! You know how some people are born with organs or hormones that aren't entirely male or female?"

"You mean intersex people? Yeah, I know."

"Well, you know people used to surgically 'correct' them at birth, so that their sex was either male or female?"

"Yeah, why?"

"It's sort of like genome editing, isn't it? Changing someone to be something they weren't? Well, society is finally realizing that it's NOT OKAY to surgically change someone's sex without asking. So hopefully when genome editing becomes as normal as surgery, most people will be smart enough to only edit out the diseases."

This reassured me somewhat. "Okay... that's good."

"It is indeed. Anyway, with CRISPR in the hands of society, we're gonna have to be really careful."

"Yep," I agreed, "we will...."

The End