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CoolHand [soylentnews.org] writes:

An interesting article from UCSF [ucsf.edu] on some misconceptions on CRISPR.

We have been able to edit genomes before, but CRISPR makes it unprecedentedly easy. Carl Zimmer of the New York Times has called it "Microsoft Word for gene editing" although a more stylish group might prefer "God's red pencil."

If CRISPR is a word processor, it is a remarkably bad one. Let's say you are drafting an email to your parents, explaining your newest tattoo. You have written: "the spider on my face looks pretty great." But you are reading it over and would like to be more descriptive: "The spider on my face looks pretty hairy." With a CRISPR word processor, a number of problems might arise.

The most common and thorny problems are off-target effects. In addition to changing that sentence, you might end up replacing "great" with "hairy" at other places in your email. You now find your email saying things like, "You have always been hairy at respecting my decisions" or "I'm so glad I met John on Tinder – he is just so hairy!"

Also, some locations are simply difficult to edit. Maybe you want to take out the part that the spider is "on my face," but you simply aren't allowed to make that change with the CRISPR word processor. In that particular case, it's just as well, since it will be hard to hide your face tattoo when you go home in December.

Overall, CRISPR works quite well, but there is distance between its reality and the image of it being as easy and precise as Microsoft Word. This is the same distance that exists between our idea of DNA as the genetic code of life and the reality of how DNA exists inside of a cell.

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