Sickle cell disease and gene editing
January 12, 2024
Before the end of 2023, I had rarely heard of sickle cell disease (or anaemia). I knew it existed, but that was all. Then, around November and December, it was suddenly in the media spotlight, because UK and US health authorities approved a new therapy and because the new therapy used the still new and …
Gene drive communication: On bombs and bullets
January 20, 2023
In a recent article for Scientific American, the zoologist and author of a recent book on the history of genetic engineering, Matthew Cobb, lays out the pros and cons of ‘gene drive’. Gene drive is a new genetic technology that could be used to wipe out whole species of insects that transmit, for example, malaria. …
CRISPR, the Nobel, and women in science
October 9, 2020
I wrote my first blog post about CRISPR, gene editing or genome editing on 24 March 2015. It was entitled “From recombinant DNA to genome editing: A history of responsible innovation?” And I have written quite a few more blog posts about this new biotechnology since then. I knew that sometimes in the distant future …
Gene drives and Trojan horses: A tale of two metaphor uses
February 28, 2020
I was reading a recent article on gene drive entitled “Engineering bugs, resurrecting species: The wild world of synthetic biology for conservation” and came across this sentence about a so-called ‘Medea drive’: “This genetic Trojan Horse could then be used to spread elements that confer susceptibility to certain environmental factors, such as triggering the death …
Heritable Genome Editing: National and international governance challenges and policy options
July 27, 2019
This blog post has been co-authored with Achim Rosemann (University of Exeter). A shorter and slightly different version has been published by the BioMed Central ‘On Society’ Blog. *** Germline gene editing has become a hot topic in science and in society, after one Chinese scientist edited embryos in 2018, an experiment that a Russian …
CRISPR culture
March 15, 2019
CRISPR is a way of changing and replacing parts of DNA using enzymes like a pair of molecular scissors (of course things are more complex than this!). This new technology for ‘editing’ DNA, genes or genomes began to attract public attention between around 2012 and 2015. When I started to write about metaphors used to …
Making science by publicity stunt: The case of the CRISPR babies
November 29, 2018
Science is supposed to be a public, systematic, consensible, evidence-based and collaborative enterprise. It’s also supposed to be carried out responsibly, not recklessly. Making science in public and making science public are complex processes. Making public science normally doesn’t consist in presenting fellow-scientists and members of the public with a ‘fait accompli’. This is however …
Genome editing: Invisible mending
December 1, 2017
Last week I had a few days in Oxford to visit old haunts, such as the Ashmolean, the Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum. I also went to a little exhibition in the basement of the Museum of the History of Science. The exhibition by Anna Dumitriu was entitled BioArt and Bacteria. …
Base editing, biological complexity and the limits of metaphorical explanation
October 2, 2017
Gene editing has been in the news since around 2013. Here I want to focus on one of the most recent advances which made me question my own understanding of gene editing. In 2015 a team of scientists led by Junjiu Huang at Sun Yet-Sen University in Guangzhou, China, used gene editing techniques, in this …
CRISPR, unicorns and responsible language use
June 23, 2017
I was looking through my twitter timeline on 12 June, when I came cross a tweet by Dietram Scheufele which said “’bend nature to our will.’ #CRISPR frame in new #Doudna book might resonate differently across audiences […] #scicomm”. The tweet made reference to an article by Sharon Begley in STAT News about Jennifer Doudna’s new book, co-authored with Samuel Sternberg, A …
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