It is now easy to edit the genomes of plants, animals and humans

Having worked with this technology, there is a ton of hype.<p>This is NOT easy. First of all you cannot target any sequence; it must match a certain consensus pattern. Second, while cutting is easy (to delete or knock out a gene), introducing a substitution is hard and requires a lot of chance. Third, the process is extremely noisy. You cannot guarantee your edit will occur. Usually you must verify by resequencing, which is actually worse than shRNA.<p>Finally we are far away from full body gene therapy this way, which would involve delivering a CRISPR kit to every cell.<p>In short this is a powerful experimental tool but it is extremely far from freely editing the genome.

My only hope, with regard to genetic engineering, is that the people who are actually discovering this stuff are strong enough to prevent large corps from patenting all of the most important intellectual property that will empower future generations.<p>My active imagination hypothesizes that the people who go to work every day to invent &#x2F; discover this stuff go to work only with the meager hope of collecting on their 6-figure salaries to provide for their families and pay their children through higher education. Perhaps even a stint at an Ivy League school. Meanwhile empowering large multinational corporations &#x2F; conglomerates with the enormous wealth of intellectual property that their grandparents would be ashamed of.

Here&#x27;s a Radiolab segment about it (CRISPR) if anyone is interested: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.radiolab.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;antibodies-part-1-crispr&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.radiolab.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;antibodies-part-1-crispr&#x2F;</a> I highly recommend listening to it

The article links to another on &quot;gene drives&quot; that use CRISPR to spread genes far more quickly through populations.[0] <i>Cities of the Red Night</i>?<p>&gt;ANIMALS typically have two versions of any given gene stored on two different chomosomes—basically large DNA molecules—and the two versions can have important differences. Offspring normally inherit only one of each pair of chromosomes from each parent, and thus each version of the gene typically gets into only half of them. Technologies like CRISPR make it possible to break this rule with something called a gene drive—a gene that uses gene-editing techniques to copy itself from one chromosome to the other, so that whichever chromosome the offspring inherit they get the same version. The same will then apply to their offspring, too (see diagram).<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;briefing&#x2F;21661801-giving-bits-dna-power-edit-themselves-intriguing-and-worrying-possibility" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;briefing&#x2F;21661801-giving-bits-...</a>

I would say these so-called &quot;ethical questions&quot; are always a red herring (not because they&#x27;re unimportant, but rather because we don&#x27;t have a reliable authority to handle them); the real problems that should really be explored beforehand are matters of jurisprudence (e.g. commercial control vs. state control and its implications) and potential weaponization.

There was a great talk on the topic of CRISPR-Cas9 at the Hacker News London meet up this month by Edward Perello. Video is here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;137001197" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;137001197</a>. It&#x27;s a good introduction to the topic from a hacker&#x27;s perspective.

It&#x27;s more accurate to say, CRISPR represents a technology which makes it easier to change genes in living organisms, possibly in a heritable way.<p>It makes no changes to the delivery mechanism, that is, you still have to make the genomic changes in the cells that matter.<p>I&#x27;m greatly appreciative of CRISPR because it elegantly solves the &quot;specific template problem&quot;: by providing a generalized sequence non-specific mechanism, any target sequence can be addressed using DNA synthesis. previously, you would have to engineer a unique protein to locate a specific sequence, and because peoples genomes differ, you&#x27;d have to reengineer the protein for individuals.

The difficulty in realizing the promise of genetic engineering to treat disease, or even do the more esoteric things like enhance abilities or create new species has not been altering genomes. The difficulty has been and continues to be the tremendous difficulty in understanding how proteins fold, given a DNA sequence, and on top of that understanding the biochemical reaction pathways and feedback loops. In the 90&#x27;s early work showed that sime changes could profound and often detrimental effects.

Where would I go to get a job as a software engineer working on CRISPR simulations?

Nice paywall you have there.

&quot;easy&quot;