Haidu Li
CWRU Undergraduate Biology and Classics

The Thread of Life
In Greek mythology, three goddesses of fate, the Moirai, determine the lives of all livings using threads. The eldest of them spins the thread of life from a spindle, representing life’s creation. The second goddess measures the length of the thread to decide the length of one’s life, and the youngest of them cuts the thread when one’s life has come to an end. At the time when the ancient Greeks were creating such intriguing stories, no one would have thought that the secrets of life are indeed concealed in a double-stranded “thread”-- DNA. With modern-day knowledge and technology, we are able to unravel some of those secrets and even modify the genes. In my illustration of the Moirai, the goddesses are working not with threads from a spindle, but genes from a chromosome. They are portrayed as young women, as the field of gene editing is still young, full of challenges yet to be tackled. The scissor of the youngest goddess is no longer a symbol of death, but a symbol of change and modification, just like the scissor representing CRISPR-Cas9. The fate that was once known only to the gods is now in the hands of humans.