Every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a heart attack. Cardiovascular diseases, including heart disease, are the leading causes of death globally making the race for a cure an important one. A volunteer in New Zealand “has become the first person to undergo DNA editing in order to lower their blood cholesterol, a step that may foreshadow wide use of the technology to prevent heart attacks.” The experiment involves “injecting a version of the gene-editing tool CRISPR in order to modify a single letter of DNA in the patient’s liver cells” which should be enough to permanently reduce a patient’s “bad” cholesterol. As Sekar Kathiresan, a gene researcher, explains, “If this works and is safe, this is the answer to heart attack—this is the cure.”