How to edit a human

1843 Magazine

How to edit a human

By this stage, laboratories around the world were trying to uncover how CRISPR could be used to edit a gene. In Lithuania, Virginijus Siksnys was one of the acknowledged leaders. His laboratory had treated CRISPR like an app, showing how its DNA sequence could be taken from one bacteria and “installed” in another, where it worked perfectly to protect the organism. In the race to discover how to use CRISPR to alter the genome, his laboratory and Doudna’s would eventually come near to a dead heat. “Race” is not quite the right word, though: at this point neither knew for certain where the finish line was.