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posted by janrinok on Friday July 24 2015, @02:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the sobering-thought dept.

The stakes, however, have changed. Everyone at the Napa meeting had access to a gene-editing technique called Crispr-Cas9. The first term is an acronym for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats," a description of the genetic basis of the method; Cas9 is the name of a protein that makes it work. Technical details aside, Crispr-Cas9 makes it easy, cheap, and fast to move genes around—any genes, in any living thing, from bacteria to people. "These are monumental moments in the history of biomedical research," Baltimore says. "They don't happen every day."

Using the three-year-old technique, researchers have already reversed mutations that cause blindness, stopped cancer cells from multiplying, and made cells impervious to the virus that causes AIDS. Agronomists have rendered wheat invulnerable to killer fungi like powdery mildew, hinting at engineered staple crops that can feed a population of 9 billion on an ever-warmer planet. Bioengineers have used Crispr to alter the DNA of yeast so that it consumes plant matter and excretes ethanol, promising an end to reliance on petrochemicals. Startups devoted to Crispr have launched. International pharmaceutical and agricultural companies have spun up Crispr R&D. Two of the most powerful universities in the US are engaged in a vicious war over the basic patent. Depending on what kind of person you are, Crispr makes you see a gleaming world of the future, a Nobel medallion, or dollar signs.

The technique is revolutionary, and like all revolutions, it's perilous. Crispr goes well beyond anything the Asilomar conference discussed. It could at last allow genetics researchers to conjure everything anyone has ever worried they would—designer babies, invasive mutants, species-specific bioweapons, and a dozen other apocalyptic sci-fi tropes. It brings with it all-new rules for the practice of research in the life sciences. But no one knows what the rules are—or who will be the first to break them.

Finally. I've been waiting for my Four-assed monkey for years.


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  • (Score: 2) by gringer on Friday July 24 2015, @09:14PM

    by gringer (962) on Friday July 24 2015, @09:14PM (#213341)

    CRISPR is great, but it's worth pointing out that it's not 100% effective. You can't just give someone a pill and transform all their DNA in exactly the right place in a couple of weeks.

    I attended a talk yesterday from a representative of a company making CRISPR-related products. With the right technique, success rates for cultured cells are in the range of 5-25%, and even if the editing process works, there's no guarantee that it will happen in the right place. One example that was given by the representative was a particular sequence that had a single perfect match to the target genome and no matches with one variant position, but over 400 genomic positions that differed from the sequence in four positions; this sequence would not be a good choice for CRISPR editing.

    The most successful way to use CRISPR is to culture some cells, attempt the editing process, grow the cells a bit more, then take samples of grown cells to determine which cells were successfully edited. Then the sucessfull cells can be cultured further to a population of therapeutic size, and used as desired. Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work so well for editing work on a living animal, because it's quite difficult to remove the cells that were edited incorrectly.

    --
    Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @12:54AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27 2015, @12:54AM (#214037)

    Sounds like they may be misinterpreting the data:
    https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=8579&cid=213254#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]

    That alternative explanation forces us to assume ~3% of cells in culture are mutants for any given gene. It is not clear whether that is plausible.