What to expect in ’18: science in the new year
https://www.Nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00009-5 Insights from cancer & ancient #genomes. Cures from #CRISPR. Progress in
#OpenAccess. Also, lots on outer space. But nothing on #cryoEM, #DeepLearning, #QuantumComputing or the brain connectome. HT @OBahcall
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“One of Esvelt’s goals at M.I.T. is to facilitate that shift. Part of his job, as he sees it, is to challenge what he describes as “the ridiculous notion that natural and good are the same thing.” Instead, he told me, we ought to think about intelligent design as an instrument of genetics. He smiled because the phrase “intelligent design” usually refers to the anti-Darwinian theory that the universe, with all its intricacies and variations, is too complex to have arisen by chance—that there had to be a guiding hand. The truth is more prosaic, and also more remarkable: for four billion years, evolution, driven by natural selection and random mutation, has insured that the most efficient genes would survive and the weakest would disappear. But, propelled by CRISPR and other tools of synthetic biology, intelligent design has taken on an entirely new meaning, one that threatens to transcend Darwin—because evolution may soon be guided by us.”
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How DNA Editing Could Change Life on Earth
http://www.NewYorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/rewriting-the-code-of-life Intelligent design from CRISPR & gene drive rather than natural selection
Whole-organism lineage tracing by combinatorial… genome editing, w. #CRISPR + seq. barcodes, by @JShendure lab
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/05/25/science.aaf7907 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/05/25/science.aaf7907
Humans 2.0 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/16/the-gene-hackers @eric_lander: “What I love: #CRISPR [can] KO every gene &
identify…the [cancer] cell’s Achilles’ heels”
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“What I love most about the CRISPR process is that you can take any cancer-cell line, knock out every gene, and identify every one of the cell’s Achilles’ heels,” Eric Lander, the fifty-eight-year-old director of the Broad, told me recently. Lander, who was among the leaders of the Human Genome Project, said that he had never
encountered a more promising research tool. “You can also use CRISPR to systematically study the ways that a cancer cell can escape from a treatment,” he said. “That should make it possible to build a comprehensive road map for cancer.”
Lander went on to say that each vulnerability of a tumor might be attacked by a single drug. But cancer cells elude drugs in many ways, and, to succeed, a therapy may need to block them all. That strategy has proved effective for infectious diseases like AIDS. “Remember the pessimism about H.I.V.,” he said, referring to the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when a diagnosis was essentially a death sentence. Eventually, virologists developed a series of drugs that interfere with the virus’s ability to replicate. The therapy became truly successful, however, only when those drugs, working together, could block the virus completely.
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A tool to easily edit DNA transforms research, holds potential for medicine – The Boston Globe
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/11/30/tool-easily-edit-dna-transforms-research-holds-potential-for-medicine/X7srGGFardarsWBfCqEL2H/story.html
The technique has become so ubiquitous that it has entered the casual vernacular of science as a verb; people talking about “CRISPRing” genes they want to tweak or delete.
Right on target: New era of fast genetic engineering. Nice “historical overview” of the development of #CRISPR-Cas
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129530.900-right-on-target-new-era-of-fast-genetic-engineering.html