Jointly hosted by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine’s Human Gene-Editing Initiative—alongside the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the U.K. Royal Society—the meetings brought together experts from all over the globe to talk about the many issues surrounding research that’s currently being conducted to alter human genes. Specifically, the discussion centered on a revolutionary new gene-editing technique called CRISPR, which stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” These short DNA sequences are a key component in the immune systems of bacteria. “When viruses attack bacteria, the bacteria mobilize CRISPRs to neutralize the attack by destroying specific DNA sequences in the invading virus,” said biochemist Sam Sternberg, Ph.D., who studied in one of the labs credited with making the discovery, the Doudna Lab at U.C. Berkeley, and is the author of an upcoming book about CRISPR’s discovery. “By transplanting CRISPR into other kinds of cells, though, scientists have developed a new way to alter the genome.”
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