Carl Zimmer, writing for the New York Times, explores a new technology that allows scientists to precisely alter pieces of an organism’s genome. Zimmer’s piece talks about this technology, called Crispr, as it relates to mosquitoes, malaria, and human health. As an organization striving towards public awareness and engagement on emerging genetic technology, we were pleased to read the following excerpt from the article.
“In their Science paper, Dr. Church and his colleagues called for a conversation about how to judge the risks of the technique and what regulations should be put in place.
Dr. Snow agreed, saying, ‘We need to discuss this now, because it’s right on the horizon.'”
A call to fight malaria one mosquito at a time by altering DNA,” by Carl Zimmer, July 2014, The New York Times.
For more on genome editing technology from The New York Times, read Andrew Pollack’s “A powerful new way to edit DNA” (March 2014).