It's a Snip!

Emmanuel Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna are worthy winners of the Nobel Prize for 'Chemistry' (there is no 'Biology' Prize) for their work on improving CRISPR (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/oct/07/scientists-win-nobel-chemistry-prize-for-genetic-scissors). As mentioned previously, CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a cheap and powerful method of gene editing. These scientists basically modified a mechanism that bacteria use to protect themselves from invasion by viruses. The bacteria recognise DNA sequences and then 'snip' them. Charpentier and Doudna basically improved these 'genetic scissors', making them programmable so that they could recognise any DNA sequence. The got the 'scissors' to work in cell cultures and in whole organisms. The technique has since been used to 'turn off' harmful or unhelpful genes in medical situations (curtailing the effects of inherited disorders and making transplants possible). It has also been used in agriculture, to produce plants with new characteristics including improved resiatance to disease etc.. Like most discoveries in Science, however, there is a downside. Some people (including one of the Prize winners), worry that the technique might be used to create 'designer babies' (babies whose features are chosen before birth by their parents). The benefits, however, clearly outweigh the costs.