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It was standing room only in the Harvard Medical School auditorium last week, the atmosphere electric as an audience of hundreds hummed with anticipation — for a highly technical talk by a visiting scientist, Dr. Jennifer Doudna of Berkeley. Near the front sat the medical school’s dean, Dr. Jeffrey Flier.
“I don’t believe in my years at Harvard Medical School I’ve ever seen a crowd of this magnitude for a lecture of this kind,” he said.
The draw?
“The draw is, this is one of the most exciting topics in the scene of biology today.”
That buzzworthy biology topic is a revolutionary new method to “edit” DNA that has spread to thousands of labs around the world just in the last couple of years.
Suddenly, it’s no longer purely science fiction that humankind will have the ability to tinker with its own gene pool. But should it?
Learn This Acronym: CRISPR
The hot new gene-editing tool is known by the acronym CRISPR, for “clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats.” It acts as a sort of molecular...