A feature-length documentary chronicling the story of CRISPR premiered at the SXSW festival yesterday.

From executive producer Dan Rather and director Adam Bolt, the co-writer and editor of the Oscar-winning film Inside Job, comes the story of the biggest tech revolution of the 21st Century. And it isn’t digital, it’s biological.

A breakthrough called CRISPR has given us unprecedented control over the basic building blocks of life. It opens the door to curing diseases, reshaping the biosphere, and designing our own children. Human Nature is a provocative exploration of CRISPR’s far-reaching implications, through the eyes of the scientists who discovered it, the families it’s affecting, and the bioengineers who are testing its limits. How will this new power change our relationship with nature? What will it mean for human evolution? To begin to answer these questions we must look back billions of years and peer into an uncertain future.

“Human Nature” is described as “a provocative exploration of CRISPR’s far-reaching implications, through the eyes of the scientists who discovered it, the families it’s affecting, and the bioengineers who are testing its limits.” The film, which doesn’t hesitate to call CRISPR “the most important scientific discovery of the 21st century” in its trailer, is produced by veteran journalist Dan Rather and includes commentary from Jennifer Doudna, Feng Zhang, George Church, and others who have played a key role in launching the gene- editing technology to its important — and controversial — status.

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