In the year since receiving the experimental treatment, she's had no severe pain or hospitalization. It affects about 100,000 Americans, including Victoria Gray, a Mississippi mother of four who became the first American to be treated with CRISPR-fixed genes. They include muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease, and sickle-cell disease, a blood disorder that brings debilitating pain, infections, and early death. About 7,000 human diseases are caused by gene mutations that, in theory, we can simply snip away. Those medical treatments show off CRISPR's most jaw-dropping possibilities. Clinical trials are underway to treat some cancers using CRISPR techniques. Scientists have bred more nutritious tomatoes, and created a wheat that doesn't contain gluten. Since Doudna published her paper in 2012, a lot's been going on in the world's CRISPR labs. "And then I realized by the end, I was understating the case." "When I started this book, I thought, 'OK, biotechnology and CRISPR, it's the most amazing thing happening in our time,'" Isaacson said. His latest, "The Code Breaker" (published by Simon & Schuster, part of ViacomCBS), is about Jennifer Doudna and her work on CRISPR. Walter Isaacson is the author of bestselling books about Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |