Among all the doom and gloom, some good news about our health prospects

It’s called gene editing.

As a BBC story puts it:

“Scientists are now able to edit genes from organisms. Gene editing has already been used for some devastating illnesses – with great success. However, it is often lengthy and costly.

Only five years ago a form of gene editing was discovered with great fanfare. It is called CRISPR Cas9, or CRISPR for short. Simply put, CRISPR uses “molecular scissors” to alter a very specific strand of DNA – either cutting it out, replacing it or tweaking it.

It is now used in labs all over the world, altering and manipulating the genes of plants and animals with the idea that it can soon be used to treat numerous human diseases.”

You can read the full article here.


 




XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>