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A DNA-editing technique based on bacterial memories could revolutionize medicine. But some worry it could get out of control

The age of genetic engineering began in the 1970s, when Paul Berg spliced DNA from a bacterial virus into a monkey virus and Herbert W. Boyer and Stanley N. Cohen created organisms in which introduced genes remained active for generations. By the late 1970s Boyer's company, Genentech, was churning out insulin for diabetics using Escherichia coli modified to contain a synthetic human gene. And in laboratories around the country, researchers were using transgenic mice to study disease.

These triumphs changed the course of medicine. But the early methods had two big limitations: they were imprecise and hard to scale. Researchers overcame the first limit in the 1990s by designing proteins that could snip specific locations of DNA, a big improvement over inserting DNA into cells at random and hoping for a useful mutation. Yet they still had to devise a new protein tailored to every sequence of DNA that they wanted to targetand that was slow, painstaking work.

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Read more from the original source:
Is the Gene-Editing Revolution Finally Here?

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