Responding to CRISPER/Cas9

摘要

The prospect of influencing the course of human evolution through technological intervention has been thought about for a long time, but usually in an abstract or theoretical way. But that possibility has become an impending reality at a breath-taking pace in the past few years. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published a paper in Science in June 2012 that demonstrated that CRISPR/Cas9 (if you must know, clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats, with CRISPR associated protein 9) is a remarkably accurate and relatively easy-to-use tool for editing genes. In October Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute published a paper in Science that demonstrated that CRISPR could be used to edit mammalian genes. Soon after, George Church of Harvard published a paper demonstrating the use of CRISPR in human cells. Excitement spread quickly through the scientific community as researchers realized that this new capability opened doors to a mind-boggling array of new directions for research.