Watch: John Oliver tells us some things we need to know about how gene editing really works

The general reaction to the idea of gene editing as a form of medial treatment is that of alarm and suspicion. Justifiably.

But not everyone, including some outside the medical community, seems to think so. The host of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver, took a break from politics in his show to try and debunk the fear of DNA modifications in the genome of a living organism.

“It’s like cut and paste in Microsoft Word,” Oliver said. “If there’s something that you want to fix on a strand of DNA, with CRISPR you can theoretically find it, cut it out and paste in a fix – at which point presumably Clippy shows up and says, ‘Hi, looks like you’re trying to play god and alter the basic building blocks of life. Need some help?’”

Oliver did emphasise the need to use the technology responsibly, however, saying, “It seems gene editing is either going to cure all disease or kill every last one of us.”

Corrections and clarifications: The headline of this article has been changed as it did not earlier reflect both the pros and cons of gene editing, as explained by John Oliver.