Why CRISPR May Be the Most Important Thing to Happen on the Planet in 4.5 Billion Years
This Gene-Editing Technology Promises to Revolutionize Medicine, Spark Ethical Debate, and Might Even Bring Woolly Mammoths Back to Earth
Bringing extinct species back to life may sound like science fiction, but it’s a real thing—perhaps the most important to occur during the past 4.5 billion years. Called “de-extinction,” the resurrection of lost species is one of the many applications to be revolutionized by the new gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9. CRISPR, which stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” hit the headlines in October when researchers Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry for their role in developing a new technique for genetic editing. CRISPR …
