CRISPR – Quanta Magazine

Why Do We Get Old, and Can Aging Be Reversed?

Steven Strogatz — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 20:46:37 +0000

Everybody gets older, although not everyone ages in the same way. For many people, late life includes a deterioration of health brought on by age-related disease. Yet there are also people who retain a more youthful vigor, and around the world, women typically live longer than men. Why is that? In this episode, Steven Strogatz speaks with Judith Campisi and Dena Dubal...

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Nobel Chemistry Prize Awarded for CRISPR ‘Genetic Scissors’

Jordana Cepelewicz — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 10:02:59 +0000

A humbling lesson of science is that, even when it comes to many of humanity’s most brilliant inventions, nature got there first. The 2020 selection for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to two scientists who share credit for identifying and developing a revolutionary method of genome editing — one that has allowed researchers to modify and investigate the genomes of microbial...

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Biodiversity Alters Strategies of Bacterial Evolution

Jordana Cepelewicz — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 15:30:19 +0000

In the closing paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin urged readers to “contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” Those plants, birds, insects and worms, he continued, all evolved as they did because of the complex web of ecological...

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Doudna’s Confidence in CRISPR’s Research Potential Burns Bright

Vanessa Schipani — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 15:50:50 +0000

No one needs to remind Jennifer Doudna about the power of CRISPR, the precision genome-editing technology she codeveloped. CRISPR “gives us a way to ultimately control the evolution of any organism — including ourselves. It is a profound thing. Human beings have now learned enough about our own genetic code that we can change it at will,” she said. “It’s kind of crazy to think about.

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Gene Drives Work in Mice (if They’re Female)

John Rennie and Jordana Cepelewicz — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 18:00:39 +0000

Conservationists and bioethicists often regard the packages of engineered DNA called “gene drives” with a mixture of wonder, excitement and dread. Gene drives violate the normal rules of inheritance by making sure they get passed down to all of their host organism’s offspring, not just to half of them; they therefore have the unnerving potential to rapidly and irrevocably alter a population.

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