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Biology: Hacking DNA

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Hacking DNA: The Story of CRISPR, Ken Thompson, and the Gene Drive

Geoff Ralston said:
The very nature of the human race is about to change. This change will be radical and rapid beyond anything in our species’ history. A chapter of our story just ended and the next chapter has begun.

This revolution in what it means to be human will be enabled by a new genetic technology that goes by the innocuous sounding name CRISPR, pronounced “crisper”. Many readers will already have seen this term in the news, and can expect much more of it in the mainstream media soon. CRISPR is an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats and is to genomics what vi (Unix’s visual text editor) is to software. It is an editing technology which gives unprecedented power to genetic engineers: it turns them into genetic hackers. Before CRISPR, genetic engineering was slow, expensive, and inaccurate. With CRISPR, genome editing is cheap, accurate, and repeatable.

This essay is a very non-technical version of the CRISPR story concluding with a discussion of Gene Drive1, a biological technique which, when used with CRISPR, gives even greater power to genetic engineers. The technical details go very deep and for those who are interested in diving in, I’ve included a number of useful pointers. At the end, I will very briefly discuss the implications of these two new technologies.

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CRISPR is very interesting, but it isn't at the point where any Tom, Dick, or Harry can now be a successful genetic engineer. Identifying where to change something, what the change will be, and doing it is no where near. Most human DNA is (or is thought to be) non-coding, and that is a major unknown in the matter. The other things that will slow down developments is that most physical attributes of humans and other animals are the products of more than one structure and more than one piece of DNA. CRISPR allowed people to create a new DNA sequence for yeast, but yeasts are not quite as complicated as humans.
http://www.nature.com/news/first-synthetic-yeast-chromosome-revealed-1.14941


If you want a pair of wings from DNA, then you will have to wait a little while, but put in your order now.
 
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