Science hype deserves negative attention for the harm it does including both to science itself and to patients. I’ve seen two really egregious examples of hype lately in science headlines. First from the Washington Post comes a stem cell story with a very hype-ful title: Stanford researchers ‘stunned’ by stem cell experiment that helped stroke […]
2 Recent Science Hype Awards on CRISPR & Stem Cells Read More »
Here is another of my blog posts from yesterday’s CRISPR meeting on ethics, science, and policy held here at UC Davis. You can read the others here, here, and here. Note as with the other posts, since I was taking notes as listening and on the fly, this post is a stream of consciousness on
UC Davis CRISPR meeting: Vital Role of Language in CRISPR Read More »
The CRISPR meeting has started off wonderfully with a talk by Ben Hurlbut. His talk was entitled, “The Demands of CRISPR’s World: Imagination, Deliberation and Governance”. Since I took notes and listened this post is somewhat freeform. I liked how Ben asked a lot of questions. What is “CRISPR’s world” as Science Magazine called it? How
UC Davis CRISPR Meeting: Big Picture from Ben Hurlbut Read More »
The gene editing technology CRISPR has been arguably the top story in the biomedical world in the last two years, but going forward there is a CRISPR challenger in upstart gene editing technology NgAgo. For more background on NgAgo and the key first published paper on its genetic modification characteristics see my post here. In the comments on that
NgAgo a-go-go: main bullet points on upstart CRISPR challenger Read More »
Over on Twitter Magdalena Plotczyk (@MPlotczyk) posted a striking photo of an anti-GMO poster from Lausanne, Switzerland. The top part of the poster translates as, “‘After GMO corn, GMO children?’” As readers of this blog know, I do have concerns about the eventual production of genetically modified people using rapidly evolving genetic modification/gene editing technology such as CRISPR.
Anti-GMO poster in Switzerland invokes human GMOs Read More »
A new study on treating pain with a unique stem cell connection caught my attention. The paper was from a team at Pfizer led by Edward B. Stevens. Talk about bench to bedside, these researchers went all the way from patients to patient somatic cells to reprogrammed IPSC to neurons to model pain in a dish
Pain in a dish? Drug testing bench to bedside with IPS cells Read More »
I talked last year about human genetic modification by CRISPR with George Church a year ago. Now we’ve followed up with a long chat on this topic going into much more detail and with questions on recent developments. Each question is listed numerically and then there is a back and forth on that question with George
George Church chat: CRISPR people, Zika, weapons Read More »
There’s a questionable notion floating around out there in the numerous discussions over heritable human genetic modification and CRISPR. This idea goes that if germline human gene editing goes awry for any number of reasons, scientists could simply reverse it by applying genetics again. The reversal notion does not fit with the reality of science
You can’t retract a designer baby: CRISPR, social justice, & risks Read More »
Remember that CRISPR patent battle? Who really invented CRISPR? If it was many people and labs, who did it first and who deserves the credit? When things like Nobel Prizes and Patents get decided on CRISPR-Cas9, who will be for lack of a better way of putting it, the winners and the losers? It’s not
A hunch on that CRISPR patent battle as it heats up Read More »
We just ran a CRISPR backronym contest here at the Niche blog. What were we looking for in terms of CRISPR backronyms? We were hoping to see backronyms that were in a sense clever explanations using the letters C, R, I, S, P, R for what CRISPR might “really” stand for if it weren’t Clustered, Regularly,
Winner of CRISPR backronym contest Read More »