Ricki Lewis

While James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, calls genome editing a "national security threat", bioethicists warn of CRISPR-created superbabies, and prominent researchers argue whether patents trump papers, I prefer to quietly look at applications of the technology that aren’t dramatic enough to enter the endless news cycle, but elegantly reveal the power of the technology. Read More 

At the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in October, CRISPR-Cas9 inventors Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier accepted the Gruber Genetics Prize, then stopped by the press room. For me, this was a little like sitting down with Bono and Bruce Springsteen, but the women were wonderfully down-to-earth, and a little stunned at all the attention since they published their key paper in 2012 on the technique that is speeding gene editing and making genome editing a reality.

This week an International Summit on Human Gene Editing held in Washington DC discussed the potential promises and pitfalls of gene editing technology. A terrific review is here. For those of us who were around at the debut of modern biotechnology in the 1970s, it’s déjà vu all over again. I hope the outcome will be the same. Although concern over recombinant DNA technology back then began with alarm, it basically ended with not triple-headed purple monsters, as my then-grad-school advisor dubbed the concern, but with a new and more targeted source of drugs, beginning with human insulin.

Below are selected comments from Drs. Doudna (a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley) and Charpentier (director of the new Max Planck Institute of Infection Biology in Berlin) from their talks and visit to the press room in October. I’ll cover here what I didn’t a few weeks ago here and in Medscape to accompany the conference. Read More 

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have teamed two powerful technologies to correct sickle cell disease in a lab dish. Linzhao Cheng and colleagues have deployed CRISPR/Cas-9 on iPS cells to replace the mutant beta globin gene, published in Stem Cells.

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

CRISPR conjures up images of fried chicken, but it stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” – short repeated DNA sequences interspersed with areas called spacers, like stutters. The pattern of repeats and spaces attracts an enzyme, Cas9, which is like a molecular scissors that cuts wherever short RNA molecules called “guide RNAs” take it. Here’s a fuller description. Read More