dear all,

CRISPR is in the spotlight for sure. The ethics of human-genome editing is to: great power and great responsibility. But let’s see the facts. In April the Huang group at Sun Yat-sen University in China, described their use of the popular CRISPR–Cas9 technology to edit the genomes of human embryos for the first time. This is still the only one published study describing genome editing of human germ cells. But Cas9 is not the only one around: Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, MA, reported the discovery of Cpf1, a protein that also allows to edit genomes easily. In 2015 several high-profile investors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google Ventures, invested about $120 million into Editas Medicine, the genome editing firm of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kevin Esvelt, an evolutionary engineer at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University in Boston, says “If anyone messes up and a gene drive gets out into the wild, there will be a huge media circus. The message will be that scientists cannot be trusted to deal with this technology, and we will be set back by years. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, but it would require some thoughtful modelling”. But, most importantly, do you actually know how to pronounce the word CRISPR? I eventually do…