Let me come out. I enjoyed it, and I’m not much worried about so many people learning the word CRISPR from a popcorn movie. A little fun never killed any technology, and Rampage, by Brad Peyton, is less dumb than it may seem. Continue reading
More than 60 germline ethics statements have been released by the international community so far (Italy is not included in the figure). Carolyn Brokowski, from the Yale School of Medicine, read and analyzed them all in The CRISPR Journal. A glance at her pie chart reveals a snapshot of the experts’ opinions on the moral permissibility of heritable genome editing. Continue reading
When you hear the word GMOs, chances are high that you think of plants, not animals. In the last 20 years, indeed, the Frankenfood controversy has forestalled the use of genetic engineering in animal breeding. To date, only a single food animal can be eaten in a single country (the fast-growing AquAdvantage salmon approved in Canada), while transgenic plants are grown on more than 180 million hectares in over twenty countries. Genome editing is now knocking at animal farms, will the door open? Continue reading
Off-target paper retraction: Nature Methods has retracted a controversial study questioning CRISPR precision, after its authors admitted they were probably wrong. This blog’s wish is that future studies on CRISPR flaws and virtues are as reliable as the genome-editing technique.
Deregulation statement: US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue has announced that USDA will not regulate edited plants as long as they could have been created through conventional breeding. Let’s hope Europe will follow the example.
Gene therapy going “organic”: that’s the hope expressed by Merlin Crossley, when commenting his Nature Genetics paper on mutations beneficial to patients with β-thalassemia and sickle cell anemia. The word organic here means that fetal hemoglobin production can be boosted without inserting foreign DNA.
CRISPeR FRENZY 