The State of Science by Marc Zimmer

Author:Marc Zimmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Prometheus
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CRISPR Applications

In June 2018, on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Oliver turned his focus on CRISPR, saying, “One of the most extraordinary aspects of CRISPR-directed gene editing is the broad impact it has had on so many disciplines. . . . It seems at this point that the only thing CRISPR won’t be able to do is open your refrigerator door!”[14]

What makes CRISPR such an exciting technique? What can we do with CRISPR that we couldn’t do before? Jennifer Doudna has said, “By the summer of 2015, the biotechnology that I’d helped establish only a few years before was growing at a pace that I could not have imagined. And its implications were seismic—not just for the life sciences, but for all life on earth.”[15] The short answer to those questions is that genetic modifications that used to take sophisticated biological laboratories years to do can now be done in days. A PhD project costing hundreds of thousands of dollars has become an undergraduate (maybe even high school) project costing a few hundred dollars.

CRISPR has revolutionized molecular biology. Before CRISPR, gene editing was species specific, expensive, and tedious. Now researchers can edit genes in any species, and it’s cheap and fast. Thanks to CRISPR, multiple genes can be edited, added, or removed, or have their expression levels modulated at the same time. Not only will CRISPR change what researchers can do in their labs; it will also impact all our lives in one way or another. We have already seen that if you have yogurt for breakfast, the chances are very good that you have eaten cells modified by CRISPR. In the remainder of this chapter I describe some ways in which CRISPR has been applied, show some of its future potential, discuss the ethical dilemmas created by it, and finally return to CRISPR as a WMD.

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