Dreading Crispr: GMOs, Honest Brokers, And Mertonian Transgressions

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

I am grateful to Jennifer Kuzma and Jill Richardson for discussion of this essay.

Notes

I am grateful to Jennifer Kuzma and Jill Richardson for discussion of this essay.

1. For an introduction see Doudna (2015). The technology is often referred to as CRISPR‐Cas9 in reference to the Cas9 protein that does the actual genome editing. But other proteins will be used in the future, so I simply use the term CRISPR here. Note that CRISPR is not the first genome editor; other technologies such as TALENs and Zinc Finger Nucleases have been in use for years, but they are much more expensive and less precise.

2. The most widely commercialized form of genetic engineering is in crops. The process involves stitching strands of DNA from disparate organisms together into a ring structure (plasmid) that is inserted into cells of a target plant either with a special bacterium or a gene gun. The insertion process is largely uncontrolled, so the scientist needs a sifting method to isolate cells in which the foreign DNA has lodged and hopefully works as intended.

3. I was an early defender of Golden Rice as a good—if overhyped—idea (Stone 2002).