I couldn’t resist—here’s how ChatGPT ‘Ghiblized’ a famous photo of Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Prize winners for the invention of CRISPR (with sincere apologies to Master Miyazaki).
CRISPR pioneers, Ghibli style
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CRISPR News – A Trio of Firsts
Many interesting papers have been published recently; here are our top three picks. They cover an innovative gene therapy trial, a new experimental approach for oncology, and the development of novel tools to map gene enhancers.
Continue readingIs RNA unwelcome? Let’s hope it’s a misunderstanding
Rumor has it that RNA has fallen out of favor politically, presumably as a key molecule for vaccines against Covid, making it an unwelcome symbol to the U.S. administration in the era of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump. According to reports, U.S. researchers have been advised to specifically remove references to messenger RNA from research projects competing for public funding.
Continue readingEco-villains: when activism turns into sabotage
Do you remember the activists who threw tomato puree on art masterpieces? Of course we do. News reports, collective outrage, and calls for exemplary punishment followed. To stop such actions in Italy, Law Number 6 of January 22, 2024, was passed, introducing “Sanctioning provisions on the destruction, dispersion, deterioration, defacement, and illegal use of cultural or landscape heritage.” Now for another question: Do you remember the activists who tore down protective nets, uprooted plants born from Italian research, and sabotaged experiments designed to make agriculture more sustainable? Probably not — because they acted at night with their faces covered. And because both the media and politicians had little to say when these incidents happened — in June 2024 against the University of Milan and in February 2025 against the University of Verona.
Continue readingTowana celebrates 3 months with a pig kidney!
We shared her story when Towana Looney broke the 60-day record with a xeno-organ. A month has passed since then; check out what she says in this inspiring video from NYU Langone Health.
The rare story of Sonia and Eric: pioneers by force and by love
A scientific adventure whose ingredients include the looming threat of a fatal disease, the decision to reinvent themselves as biologists, and the goal of silencing prions.
The clinical trial with antisense oligonucleotides, born of their efforts, is considered one of the most interesting trials of 2025, but this is only a part of the story. This married couple is also pursuing other avenues to halt the onset of prion diseases. In the summer of 2024, they published a study in Science using epigenetic editing in mice. Then, in January 2025, their experiments with base editing were published in Nature Medicine. Yet Sonia Vallabh was a newly graduated jurist, and her husband, Eric Minikel, was working in urban planning, when they discovered that she carried a mutation that would condemn her to die of fatal familial insomnia within two or three decades.
Continue readingThe Economist explores the age of CRISPR
At first glance, it looks like the cover of a design magazine, but it’s actually the technology supplement published by The Economist in March. Titled ‘The Age of CRISPR,’ it features eight articles exploring the most cutting-edge areas of genome editing—gene therapies, xenotransplantation, epigenetic editing, gene drives, gene-edited plants, and much more. It doesn’t shy away from the challenges, from companies struggling to stay afloat to regulatory hurdles. But the tone is measured: the era of sensationalism is over, yet CRISPR is here to stay.
Continue readingAgricultural Sciences: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
I want to highlight a lecture recently given by one of the most influential scientists in the international debate on GMOs and gene editing in agriculture. Born in India, C. S. Prakash lives and works in the U.S. and has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). His lecture, delivered at the AAAS Center for Scientific Evidence in Public Issues, traces the progress made over the past sixty years in the field of global food security—i.e., meeting the growing demand for food from the world’s population.
Continue readingThe Huge Little Thing: NanoCas is Coming
It is currently only a preprint on bioRxiv, but it has already attracted significant attention from the scientific community and the journal Science. Mammoth Biosciences, a company founded by CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna, has developed NanoCas, a mini-editor that is just one-third the size of traditional gene-editing scissors (Cas9).
Continue readingEco-vandals target gene-edited Chardonnay in Italy
On the night of February 12-13, unknown vandals broke into a small experimental vineyard at the University of Verona in northern Italy to uproot Chardonnay vines that had been gene-edited to resist a fungal infection. Last September, the launch of this field trial was celebrated by researchers, producers, and prominent politicians—including Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida—because it was a point of pride for the country (the first field with gene-edited vines in Europe) and a step toward healthier, more sustainable viticulture, less reliant on fungicides. Anti-science belligerence strikes again: two experimental fields have been launched in Italy, and both have been attacked.
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CRISPeR FRENZY 