The acronym CRISPR stands for the cumbersome phrase “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats”. Media coverage of the latest CRISPR story, from Eric Topol’s twitter. Gladly, A Crack in Creation offers such a nuanced background straight from those deeply embedded in the science Jennifer Doudna is one of the scientists leading the development of CRISPR gene editing and Samuel Sternberg started his career as Doudna’s doctoral student. What I found lacking in these analyses was a thorough understanding of the actual scope and limits of CRISPR gene editing technology. But these are the same arguments we have been having since the dawn of the recombinant DNA era in the 1970s, with little reconsideration in light of the actual facts of how the technology and the human genome works. Though it took some time for the news stories to use the word “CRISPR”, as it is not yet a household name, the news sparked many opinion pieces warning of a slippery slop, down which we will be lead to “designer babies”. Shoukhrat Mitalipov and his international team announced their successful and efficient correction of a mutant MYBPC3 gene which causes the condition hypertropic cardiomyopathy, the cause of many of the sudden heart attacks in young people, in non-viable human embryos. Shortly after I finished reading Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg’s book on the development of the CRISPR gene editing technology, CRISPR was leading the news headlines.
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