It's also a lot like an announcement of any other tool of great importance: a new programming language, a new rocket engine, a new alloy, a new psychological principle - or any other discovery of import. It's profoundly interesting to watch, understand, and organize those discoveries (as news) - precisely so the more pragmatic downstream affects can be achieved.

Those who can put those various discoveries together are those that will be the ones that use those tools in conjunction in order to benefit everyone. But how are they to know about them if the discoveries themselves 'are not news'?

The article couldn't have been shared here simply because the submitter found it interesting and thought others here might feel similarly?

Even if it doesn't lead to a medical treatment, the impact of CRISPR on everyday biomedical research has already been enormous - it's probably the biggest advance in molecular biology lab techniques in the past decade. Getting it to work in humans is of course a huge project, and we can expect many failures along the way, but genetic modification is vastly easier than it was 10 years ago, when we barely had any idea how to make these kinds of changes. Every improvement to the technology makes it that much more likely that we'll see a human application in the near future.