Prime Editing and the Reprogrammable Human Genome
Science Time · 2019
"CRISPR 2.0 (Prime Editing) elevates genetic modification from a crude cutting tool to a precise word processor, unlocking the capability to cure most genetic diseases and propelling humanity into an era of directed, non-Darwinian evolution."
Mutations in DNA's 3 billion base pairs cause over 7,000 known genetic diseases. The original CRISPR-Cas9 let scientists cut DNA at specific locations to disable or insert genes, but Cas9 acts like scissors relying on the cell's own messy repair mechanisms — often introducing unpredictable off-target mutations. "Prime Editing" (CRISPR 2.0) acts less like scissors and more like a precise search-and-replace word processor for the genome.
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AlphaFold and the End of the Protein Folding Problem
"For fifty years, going from a protein's amino-acid sequence to its three-dimensional shape took months or years of experiment per protein. In 2020 a neural network did it in minutes at near-experimental accuracy, and two years later the predicted structure of nearly every catalogued protein was free to download."