We need those 10 or so years for more research and development. Humans have had CRISPR used on them many times already, but it's still early days for human trials. Most of the good stuff with CRISPR probably won't start appearing until the late 2020s.

It’s probably just that medical technologies take a long time to be approved.

TLDR: drugs in a nutshell.

Its because we don't know what effects a drug will have until we actually inject it. You have to realize that our entire body is a diffusion prone liquid chamber of a billion moving parts but we need to deliver soluble drugs to a very specific target number of cogs. That's physically impossible btw.

So we end up having unknown side effects, and every drug has them. We just have to be persistent and select the ones that are effective at curing yet tolerable enough, but this process can take upwards to a decade in clinical trials.

In practice this means we have a decade long backlog of drugs that we think are promising but haven't had the time or resources to check. We'll get to testing CRISPR in maybe a few more years.

One more thing, as a scientist who has used CRISPR systems in cell cultures, its not that 'robust' yet. If I had to choose between successful CRISPR and fliiping a coin in a game of russian roulette, I'd still take the coin lol.

It takes about a generation to go from technological breakthrough to large scale deployment of these types of innovation.

There are a lot of nuts-and-bolts R&D, medical safety testing, manufacturing, supply, and logistics issues to consider when looking at how new discoveries will broadly impact society.

So, from the initial Crispr breakthrough to actually seeing the effects of this revolutionary tech, you are looking at 15 - 25 years for some of the most important innovations to be noticeable for those of us outside the laboratory.

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Big Pharma