I Left My Heart in Marinduque(not in San Francisco): Have You Heard of CRISPR Gene Editing Technology?

Saturday, December 5, 2020

Have You Heard of CRISPR Gene Editing Technology?

Just recently, I was watching CNN Fareed Zakaria Sunday Talk#. On this recent episode his guest was 2020 Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley-one of my Alma Mater schools.

The interview was about CRISPR technology of creation of new medicines, agricultural products, controlling pathogens and pest as wells the controversial subject of editing human embryos to produce super/designer babies. This aroused my interest so in case you are not familiar with this subject, here's a brief summary from Wikipedia.

CRISPR(Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) Gene Editing is a genetic engineering technique in molecular biology by which the genomes of living organisms may be modified. It is based on a simplified version of the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 antiviral defense system. By delivering the Cas9 nuclease complexed with a synthetic guide RNA (gRNA) into a cell, the cell's genome can be cut at a desired location, allowing existing genes to be removed and/or new ones added in vivo (in living organisms).

The technique is considered highly significant in biotechnology and medicine as it allows for the genomes to be edited in vivo with extremely high precision, cheaply and with ease. It can be used in the creation of new medicines, agricultural products, and genetically modified organisms, or as a means of controlling pathogens and pests. It also has possibilities in the treatment of inherited genetic diseases as well as diseases arising from somatic mutations such as cancer.

However, its use in human germline genetic modification(designer babies) is highly controversial.

The development of the technique earned Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. The third researcher group that shared the Kavli Prize for the same discovery (led by Virginijus Šikšnys) was not awarded the Nobel prize.

In 2012 and 2013, CRISPR was a runner-up in Science Magazine's Breakthrough of the Year award. In 2015, it was the winner of that award. CRISPR was named as one of MIT Technology Review's 10 breakthrough technologies in 2014 and 2016. In 2016, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, along with Rudolph Barrangou, Philippe Horvath, and Feng Zhang won the Gairdner International award. In 2017, Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the Japan Prize in Tokyo, Japan for their revolutionary invention of CRISPR-Cas9. In 2016, Charpentier, Doudna, and Zhang won the Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science. In 2020, Charpentier and Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing."