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Comment by Cozumel | Hacker News Reader

Related: 'Unexpected mutations after CRISPR–Cas9 editing in vivo' http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v14/n6/full/nmeth.4293.h...

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This paper was incredibly sloppy and has been widely dismissed by scientists in the field.

Eh, not at all.

Well it was refuted by people in biotech, who have a considerable stake in that field.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608073/gene-editing-compa...

I thought the original authors had a rebuttal, but I can't seem to find it.

I don't think there's any need for a cui bono line of thinking. There are biologists who have nothing to gain who thought this paper was lousy. For example, every single biologist in my department that I spoke to, and every biologist I've found online who had something to say on the matter.

Perhaps that's too much of a selection bias for you, so I'll offer this critique: if you wanted to measure the off target effects of Cas9 in an organism, you would probably sequence the organism before you edited it, and then sequence it again after you edited it. But that's not what they did.

Also refuted by a team from Harvard medical school:

http://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/05/159707

Addressed by the article

Kind of addressed in the article. I'd still like to see more data before calling the issue "addressed".

(Then again, this is a lay-press article, so I don't entirely expect a lot of detail)

Not sure I would call MIT technology review lay press

Good point... but how would you describe it? It's not exactly lay-press, but it's still a secondary source. It's written for an educated audience, but not necessarily in this field.

What would you call them in this case? Science press?

Still - not enough room in an article like this for too many details.

It is, at least in the sense that it is written by journalists writing for a general audience.

I subscribed for a while, I stopped after the number of eye rolls had gotten too high.

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