The sun beats down on the quad in mid-July. What image does this conjure in your mind? For some, they might see the ladybugs flying from tree to tree, ants scurrying out of their ant holes or squirrels chasing each other around the grass. Others may look even closer and see grass being pushed ever so slightly by the wind. Some may overlook all of this and notice the shine of the sun off of the windows of Hubbard Hall and the sparsely populated, brightly colored metal chairs placed randomly on the green. Or perhaps, you’ve been enveloped by the notification coming from The New York Times or The Washington Post, and the summer day passes without registering at all. What we notice in moments like this often feels incidental, but it rarely is: Attention is shaped by what we expect to see and just as much by what quietly escapes our field of view.

The chokehold of technology on our society has pushed us to go places we never dreamed to consider going just a few decades ago. Every day I go to work in my research lab, I am taking advantage of the leaps and bounds of science and technology. The development of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system in 2012 by Dr. Jennifer Doudna and Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier informs and enables my work. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was developed back in 1983, protein visualization via immunoblotting was developed in 1979 and the system I’m developing in my cells today was first put into use in 1998. This history is rich, deep and powerful: We understand how to edit genetic code and manipulate it to answer the questions we’re most interested in.

By using these tools to answer questions of interest, we are inherently discarding other questions. Because we ask “can we?,” we sometimes forget to ask “should we?” Critics of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing argue that changing the genome someone was born with is unethical, while others argue that preventing a scientist from altering the genome and saving a child dying from cancer is also unethical. When scientists in the UK were given the green light to genetically modify human embryos, one critic argued that it is necessary to speak out against gene modification in human embryos.

One of the major critiques against genetic modification focuses on the human embryo as a source of possibility. Interestingly, other critics pushed to consider that controlling an embryo’s destiny isn’t controlling much at all. An embryo remains full of possibility; altering its eye color or reducing the risk of a particular disease may or may not influence the way its life develops. Here, we gain insight from the field of epigenomics: a field studying how a person’s genetic information changes due to environmental factors such as stress, drug and alcohol use, diet and pollution. These larger-scale data sets examine all the changes in our bodies that arise from nature. These epigenomic tools don’t just answer the questions we have, they enable us to imagine them.

Unlike the imaginative power of epigenomics, the development of CRISPR, PCR and immunoblotting prioritize specificity. It requires intention to develop a working reaction. For instance, scientists design primers that target a specific piece of genetic material, antibodies are developed to elucidate a unique protein and even CRISPR requires a guiding fragment that leads the Cas9 complex to the correct location for gene editing. Because scientific discovery gives precedence to specificity, it legitimizes questions that have a target. The answer is “yes” or “no,” rather than replying with another question. Further, the intentional selection of questions requires an equally intentional discarding of what else could be asked.

The challenge, then, is not simply that some questions go unasked, but that their absence rarely registers as a loss. When a question is never posed, its most convenient answer often becomes an assumption, quietly folded into how we think, work and operate. Over time, these assumptions begin to feel like neutral facts rather than choices that were never examined. It’s neither possible nor necessary to develop tools to investigate every question, but by the time the harm becomes visible, the assumptions that enable it are already deeply embedded.

Science has taught us how to ask increasingly precise questions of the world. In doing so, it grants us extraordinary power. We can isolate variables, target genes and predict outcomes within carefully designed systems, but precision has its limits. The more tightly a question is framed, the more confidently it can be answered, even as the surrounding system remains only partially understood. But what falls outside that frame doesn’t disappear. This discomfort is not a failure of intelligence, but a consequence of it. If these tools make us smarter while quietly reshaping how we imagine our control, then the harder task may not be learning how to intervene, but recognizing when certainty itself has become the most dangerous assumption.