The Development of Crispr DNA Editing
wired.com
wired.com
Sadly the technology is wrapped up in many lawsuits.
Like all RadioLab episodes it was brilliantly produced and an entertaining listen but CRISPR might be a little overhyped.
That's how progress happens. The difference between CRISPR and other techniques is that failed tests can be conducted for hundreds of dollars instead of thousands and in weeks instead of months.
DNA editing and writing is powerful extremely powerful. I wish there was some kind of way of controlling it. But it is probably impossible.
With great power comes great responsibility.
I mean nuclear weapons are like jokes compared to beaning able to write DNA like we write computer code today.
Editing DNA is like having the power to tweak the binary code of an Ubuntu installation. Hopefully, you will not accidentally edit the kernel (e.g., DNA replication and the ribosome). More importantly, the early days of DNA editing will be like tweaking your favorite application just by changing the binary. Sure, tiny tweaks are possible now, but creating genuinely new functionality that integrates well with the your existing "apps", e.g., height, will be rather difficult. Biological systems have a lot of non-linearity and many feedback loops to contend with.
DNA editing and human life manipulation will happen in time, but imagine writing code that takes 10-50 years to compile. Iterating and pivoting will be challenging. But, we'll have some really advanced flies since they only take 10 days to compile (I mean, reproduce).
The future is now.
"Crispr" is an acronym (in the narrow sense: an abbreviation pronounced as a word), while "RNA" is an initialism (an abbreviation formed by initial letters where each letter is pronounced independently.)
Many (esp., IIRC, British) style guides prefer treating acronyms as normal words (so, title cased in a title) and using all-caps for initialisms.
Other style guides prefer all-caps for both acronyms and initialisms.
Ugh. Overreaching rhetoric like this with no context or detail signal silly pop science writing rather than anything substantive.
By "in humans" I meant using cas9 in vivo to edit the genome of a living human person.
Making cas9 work on a person's genome, in vivo, is still not possible and I believe it would take a lot of technical work to make it actually useful (but it's certainly along the lines I have been anticipating for several decades). Sure, you could put cas9 in a pill, but you would still need a way to get the cas9 into the right cells and integrate efficiently, without it going into the wrong cells, or causing all sorts of unintended side effects.
Sophistry. CRISPR on human embryos (which were going to be discarded) is CRISPR on humans: human cells were geneticly edited with CRISPR. The point has been proven - human biology is not some special snowflake that CRISPR will uniquely fail upon.
If you want context just google it.
Plenty of information exists for CRISPR and it is definitely substantive.