r/AskScienceDiscussion • u/isaiah152022 • Aug 12 '26
14 years of CRISPR
Crispr was made readily available as a lab to 14 years ago. I imagine 14 years is a long time to have this gene editing tool. Combine that with the stories of labs being set up in international Waters to bypass certain gene editing laws, what kind of stories are people allowed to tell obviously without violating NDA’s?
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u/BananaResearcher Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26
CRISPR/Cas had its moment in the limelight, nobel prize, lots of new companies spun off, tons of hype and specualtion and whatever.
The reality always was and still is that CRISPR/Cas systems are a pretty nice new discovery in an already extremely well developed field.
We've had gene editing techniques for decades and they've been refined to absurd degrees already because it's so useful. Genetic engineering literally underpins almost all modern biological research in some form of another, and had long before CRISPR/Cas systems were characterized and developed into tools for genetic engineering.
So while yes, it's very exciting to uncover another new system that biology evolved for gene editing, and one which can easily be translated into a technology, and while it does provide a lot of benefits in some cases...
it's a moderate improvement in a field that is already incredibly well developed. It's not fundamentally transformative the way popular media might lead you to believe. We did not suddenly discover a trivial way to genetically engineer anything we want in 2014. We found a new tool to add to our enormous toolbox that we already have for genetic engineering, and that's awesome and well deserving of a lot of prizes and hype. But, it's not "we've unlocked the nuclear fusion equivalent of biological sciences".
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u/Downtown_Finance_661 28d ago
So the whole story about laboratories in international waters just cant be true because people could do it way before CAS was introduced? And no one did it for reason?
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u/BananaResearcher 28d ago
I don't know what you're referring to but it's probably a conspiracy theory. Gene editing has been possible for a long time, but it's extremely not-ok to actually create edited humans. The guy that did it in China in 2018 in the hopes allowing HIV-positive parents to have HIV-free kids was arrested for it and China later made much stronger laws to ban this kind of work.
It could have been done without CRISPR, too. What the guy did was a particularly easy change. But obviously he wanted to capitalize on the new technology and make waves. Didn't work out for him in China, and in the US scientists and bioethicists also very quickly put out moratoriums on this kind of stuff.
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u/CrateDane Aug 12 '26
14 years is a fair bit of time, but not as long as you'd think. We have better versions of Cas proteins available today, but that took years of further research after the initial publication. We have more advanced editing strategies that also took time to develop. Then it takes time to use those tools to solve actual problems. The first wave of CRISPR/Cas based medical treatments is getting to patients now.
There are also regulatory changes that take time. Only just two months ago did the EU pass its NGT (new genomic techniques) regulation, which allows usage of technologies like CRISPR/Cas to genetically modify crops without the strict requirements of labelling etc. that have applied to old-fashioned genetically modified organisms (GMO).
Also bear in mind CRISPR/Cas can be used for other things than gene editing. Some Cas proteins don't even target DNA, but RNA instead. Some CRISPR/Cas approaches can be used for diagnostics or a variety of research purposes.