crispr-cas9
The Quiet Revolution of CRISPR
CRISPR’s not on the cusp of anything.Wikicommons How many diseases could humans treat if the DNA in troublesome cells could be edited within the body? Half? Most? How about “absolutely everything”? That was the answer Irina Conboy, a bioengineer at U.C. Berkeley, recently gave to New Scientist. Her optimism illustrates the promise, announced three years […]
The Unbearable Weirdness of CRISPR
Francisco Mojica in a lab at the University of Alicante in Spain.Photograph courtesy of the University of Alicante. When Francisco Mojica was 25, he supported himself by tracking bacteria in the Mediterranean off the coast of a tourist haven in southeastern Spain. At the time, he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Alicante, […]
Gene Editing Must Reckon With the Unforeseen
Almost exactly a year ago, I attended the International Summit of Human Gene Editing at the National Academy of Sciences. It was organized in part by Jennifer Doudna, arguably one of the inventors of Crispr-Cas9. It’s a new biotech tool—cheap, easy to use, and reliable—that allows thousands of scientists around the world to modify genes […]
