Tessa R. Davis (South Carolina), Taxing the Cyborg, 101 Or. L. Rev. 137 (2022):

What position will tax play in realizing utopia? Or bringing a few dystopian future? The tax coverage of latest many years shares a lot of the blame for the profound financial inequality of in the present day. Tax has ripple results—the way it responds to current challenges shapes the longer term. One modern problem is knowing tax’s position within the nascent regulatory regime of gene enhancing and modification. CRISPR— Clustered Commonly Interspaced Brief Palindromic Repeats—is a sample of DNA present in micro organism. Paired with “Cas” genes to type a CRISPR/Cas system, CRISPR basically features as a “cut-andpaste” device, enabling the focused modification of a genetic sequence. This Article considers how tax is poised to answer CRISPR and related rising medical applied sciences with each therapeutic and socalled enhancement functions. 

Doing so exposes gaps in present tax regulation as utilized to the physique and biotechnologies. A few of these gaps are doctrinal; for instance, the prevailing § 213 medical expense deduction doctrine is ill-prepared for the interpretive problem CRISPR presents. However past the comparatively slender doctrinal gaps lie extra structural weaknesses. By imagining a world through which CRISPR gene enhancing is totally realized, we will higher recognize flaws in how present tax coverage conceptualizes the foundational idea of a taxpayer’s potential to pay, in addition to the way it treats human capital. Taxing the cyborg, it seems, will likely be no straightforward activity.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2023/07/davis-taxing-the-cyborg.html