CRISPR: What is it? Who decides what we do with it?

D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.

Imagine a word processor for genes, where you could search for a defective gene, find the mutation, cut it out, and replace it with the proper DNA sequence. The cutting and replacing part of the process is what CRISPR and its associated (Cas) systems do. They are enzymes used to clip out particular sections of DNA in a cell’s nucleus, and replace the removed sections with other DNA segments, presumably replacing “defective” DNA with “good” DNA.

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) were first described in 2012, and the technique was used in human ...read more