Scrip's Rough Guide To CRISPR Gene Editing

Gene editing has been a research goal ever since scientists came to understand that DNA carried heritable information. Gene manipulation through recombinant DNA techniques is not editing, unless your idea of editing is to rip a page from book, trim it and photocopy it, then bomb a print works with the copies and hope one becomes inserted into another book in a place that makes sense. Real gene editing had to wait until 2012, when scientists at the University California, Berkeley developed a method directly equivalent to red-line deletion or insertion of text. This was CRISPR (pronounced "crisper"), a method in which the snipping out and splicing in of DNA takes place in situ, within the organism.

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) allows precise modification to DNA, potentially enabling the creation of therapies that could...