The stakes here are high. Any company that wants to work with anything other than microbes will have to license Zhang's patent; royalties could be worth billions of dollars, and the resulting products could be worth billions more.
In an odd reversal, it’s the scientists who are showing more fear than the civilians. When I ask Church for his most nightmarish Crispr scenario, he mutters something about weapons and then stops short.
Although it is all far off from reality still I found the article to be really interesting, especially the part mentioning things like ethics with genome engineering and embryo engineering. What are your thoughts on genetic engineer and its future?
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thundara: A few notes:
- The patent dispute over CRISPR is doubly complicated by the fact that US patent law changed, from first to discover to first to file, right around the time of these discoveries
- Jennifer Doudna was one of the founders of Editas Medicine, but left to form Caribou BioSciences
- The CRISPR human embryo experiments were not performed in an optimal manner, and did not follow the protocols that a CRISPR lab would use to reduce the chance of off-target effects
The truth is, most of what scientists want to do with Crispr is not controversial. For example, researchers once had no way to figure out why spiders have the same gene that determines the pattern of veins in the wings of flies. You could sequence the spider and see that the “wing gene” was in its genome, but all you’d know was that it certainly wasn’t designing wings. Now, with less than $100, an ordinary arachnologist can snip the wing gene out of a spider embryo and see what happens when that spider matures. If it’s obvious—maybe its claws fail to form—you’ve learned that the wing gene must have served a different purpose before insects branched off, evolutionarily, from the ancestor they shared with spiders. Pick your creature, pick your gene, and you can bet someone somewhere is giving it a go.
Is a complete understatement. Short DNA fragments are dirt cheap to print, so on a lab's budget, you're talking about knocking out every gene in an organism's genome... five times over. So you can start better testing things like which genes affect cancer drug-resistance, what combination therapies work better on parasites, etc. There were ways to do this previously, using RNA interference, but CRISPR-based gene knockouts turn out to be a lot more reproducible and informative.