Some time around 1994, I heard freshly-minted Nobel laureate Tom Cech (one of the discoverers of natural RNA enzymes, aka ribozymes) give a talk in Oxford, and he finished by saying that most of what he had presented happened thanks to his brilliant post-doc, and we should remember her name, she would go on to do great things. That post-doc was Jennifer Doudna, who now has a very good chance to get a Nobel prize herself for her work on CRISPR-Cas, the “bacterial immune system”, which Doudna and others turned into a turbo-charged gene editing tool.
Currently, researchers are still teasing out some very fundamental details of how this system works in the wild, while its application in the laboratory is turning the world of genetics upside down, as it allows gene editing with unprecedented ease. And while US scientists are holding meetings to call for a moratorium on its application to the human germline, a team in China has proceeded to to just that.
This is the topic of my latest feature in Current Biology. If I got my counts right, this must be the 100th in the new format we introduced in February 2011, when I started providing a feature for every issue of the magazine (i.e. two per month). I think I only missed 3 issues since then, so I guess it worked out quite nicely. So here’s number 100:
Bacterial scissors to edit human embryos?
Current Biology Volume 25, Issue 11, pR439–R442, 1 June 2015
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