CRISPR Will Change Our Lives

By Shlomo Maital

   Some time ago, I wrote about a technology known as Blockchain that will undoubtedly change our lives – and has already. Blockchain is simply a way to record transactions, that is secure, unhackable and ‘disintermediated’ (no need for banks or other financial middlemen). It is now widely used to create digital money.

   Now comes CRISPR. It stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.     What is it? Simply, a way of editing genes – like we edit blogs or emails. Erase this group of words. Replace it with another, better one.   In the case of DNA: “Erase” (snip away) this (bad) piece of DNA, a gene that causes problems – and replace with a ‘good’ gene, that will not cause disease or problems.

   A palindrome is a word that reads the same forward and backward.   E.g. “civic”. So pieces of DNA are inserted into longer pieces, such that the inserted pieces read the same forward or backward, so it doesn’t matter which way they are inserted. The method originated with studying how viruses ‘snip’ DNA – and using viruses to do the same in constructive way.

     We now know the genetic causes of many diseases. But until now we have not had the ability to repair bad genes. Now CRISPR makes it possible. This will create an entirely new branch of medicine, immunotherapy, in which gene therapy is used to both treat illness, when identified, and mainly, to prevent it — an individual can now have his or her genome analyzed, and potential ‘bad’ genes identified. No point in doing this, so far, because there was no real way to ‘edit’ bad genes. Now, with CRISPR, there is.

     I would like to mention one of the scientists responsible for CRISPR, the young MIT scientist Feng Zhang. He was born in China and is only 36; he does research at the famous Broad (pronounced Brode) institute in Cambridge, MA. Increasingly bright foreign students are encountering US visa problems and are going elsewhere, e.g. Canada. It is America’s loss.