If there were an award for the most impactful technology that almost no one has heard of, the winner could be CRISPR.

Now, CRISPR has nothing to do with refrigerator drawers that keep fruits and vegetables fresh. No, it's the latest technology tempting us to try our hand at playing god.

CRISPR stands for—get ready, it's a mouthful—"clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat." And all God's people said, "Huh?" Well, originally, it referred to a series of repeats of the base sequences in the DNA of bacteria.

To simplify this complicated story, geneticists are learning how to use the CRISPR in bacteria to edit the genome of other, far more complicated life-forms. As Nobel Laureate Craig Mello told National Public Radio, CRISPR "essentially [allows you to] change a genome at will to almost anything you want. The sky's the limit."