Easy DNA Editing Will Remake the World. Buckle Up.:
"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."
See:
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/crispr-dna-editing-2/