Video chat, superglue, electric cars, and smartphones. The wonder of a new technology wears off. You don't think of it anymore when you're used to it. What happens when something newer and better arrives? How do you remember how things used to be?
The technology that edits genes has not reached that point yet. It has remained at the center of ambitious scientific projects and complicated ethical discussions a decade after it was first discovered. New avenues for exploration are being created. Other scientists use it as well.
Some of the wonder is still there. The excitement of novelty has been replaced by open possibilities. There are many of them.
The founder of the X-men superhero team and a botanist are both fans of the Mutants.
Dr. Martin is fond of the red and juicy type of Mutant. Dr. Martin's research focuses on plant genomes in the hopes of finding ways to make foods more robust and last longer.
One of Dr. Martin's colleagues offered to make her a tomato as a gift when she became aware of the new technology. She told him that she wanted a tomato that didn't produce chlorogenic acid, which is thought to have health benefits. She wanted to see what happened after removing the key gene sequence. There was a tomato in her lab.
It was now possible to make them. The confirmation of all the hypotheses that Dr. Martin had was given by getting those Mutants.
Researchers at Dr. Martin's lab have created a tomato plant that can grow in the sun. The leaves contained 60 times the daily value for adults.
Dr. Martin said that it was possible to modify a wide range of food items. Plants that use less water could be created.
It is a good example of what can be done with vitamins D and calcium. This is something that people like to have and hold onto. It isn't a promise, it's not
The disease is infectious.
Christian has spent his career developing methods to detect and contain the spread of infectious diseases that spread to humans from animals. There are many ways to do it.
If you want to perform a polymerase chain reaction, you need a machine that costs $60,000 and a person who is specially trained. It is impractical to take this type of testing to most remote villages.
Dr. Happi and his team used a technology called CRISPR-Cas13a to find diseases in the body. Within a couple of weeks of the outbreak arriving in Nigeria, they were able to sequence the virus and develop a test that required no on-site equipment or trained technicians.
The future of Pandemic Preparedness is what you're talking about. I would like my grandma to use this in her village.
The test is easy to use and works well in the heat. The lab is trying to convince leaders in the African public health systems to use the technology.
The proposal is cheaper, faster and can be pushed into the remotest corners of the continent. Africa would be able to occupy what is called its natural space.
There is a hereditary illness.
There was zinc finger nuclease at one point.
Gang Bao, a biochemical engineer at Rice University, was the first person to use that tool to try to treat a disease. It took more than two years for the zinc finger nuclease to be able to cut the sickle cell sequence.
It took another two years for another method to be more effective. Soon after the successful editing of genes in living cells, the team changed tack again.
It took us a long time to get some initial results. Around 60 percent of the time, the method was able to cut the target sequence. It was more effective. He said it was incredible.
Side effects of the process were the next challenge. Is it possible that the genes that weren't being targeted were affected? The method was believed to work for humans after a number of experiments. The FDA approved a clinical trial led by Dr. Matthew Porteus and his lab in 2020 There is hope that with the ability to treat other hereditary diseases, it could be used to treat other diseases. Other treatments that don't rely on gene editing have been successful.
Dr. Bao and his lab are trying to figure out all the effects of using the tool. There is a hope that a safe and effective treatment will be available in the near future. What time? He said that he thought it would take three to five years.
The cardiovascular system.
It is difficult to change a person's mind. We are often stuck in our ways, and that is not the only reason. New cells are generated at a slower rate in the heart. The heart is more difficult to treat than the other parts of the body.
It is difficult to know what is in a person's heart. There are a number of segments that remain unknown to scientists and doctors even after you sequence an entire genome. There is no way to determine if a patient has a heart condition or not. The director of the Cardiovascular Institute told him to stay. Traditionally, we would wait and tell the patient we don't know what's happening.
In his lab he has been using the befuddling sequence to see what effect it has on heart cells. Dr.Wu and his team have been able to link individual patients' genes to their heart disease by cutting out certain genes.
It will take a long time before these diseases can be treated with CRISPR. The impact of this is going to be huge in terms of personalized medicine. I want to know what these variant mean for me.
Sorghum is used in many different types of food. It isn't as good as wheat or corn when processed and hasn't been commercially engineered to the same degree.
Karen Massel saw a lot of room for improvement when she began studying the plant. She said that if you make a small change you can have a big impact.
She said that she and her colleagues used gene editing to try to make sorghum frost tolerant, to make it heat tolerant, and to shorten its growth period.
She said that this could lead to more delicious and healthier cereals, as well as making the plants more resistant to the changing climate. It's still not easy to accurately modify the genomes of crops.
Dr. Massel said that half the genes they knock out have no known function. We realize we are a bit out of our depth after trying to play God. Dr. Massel is optimistic even though he is a self-proclaimed pessimist. She hopes that the advancement of technology will lead to the commercialization of gene-edited foods.
A girl was diagnosed with leukemia in 2012 The case was advanced enough that a bone-marrow transplant was not possible. The doctors told the girl's parents to return to her hometown.
They went to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where doctors used an experimental treatment to turn the girl's white blood cells against the cancer. The girl was diagnosed with cancer ten years ago.
Car T-cell therapy was developed by Dr. Carl June, a medical professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The simplest and most accurate tool for editing T-cells outside of the body is called CRISPR. The last decade or so has seen a revolution in the treatment of blood and lymph system cancer, and it has been rewarding and exciting.
In the past couple of years, Dr. Stadtmauer helped run a clinical trial in which T-cells were inserted into patients with treatment-resistant cancers. The results were better than expected.
Some patients who had very dismal prognoses are doing well and being cured. In the case of a relapse, the edited T-cells are still present in the blood and ready to attack the tumors.
Scientists now know that it is possible to use CRISPR-aided treatments
The field has moved a lot even though it is sort of science fiction. He said that he was not as excited by the science as he was by the usefulness of the tool. He sees 15 patients who need him every day. That is what makes me want to work harder.
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