CRISPR

Environmental & Science Education
STEM
History of Science
Nature of Science
Medicine.
Edward Hessler

CRISPR is a powerful gene-editing technique.

Analogies are often used to help in understanding the impact and potential power of this technique. Among the most used are these, ranked from worst to best: a knock-out punch (#10), the hand of Gog, a bomb removal squad, a handyman at work, an eraser, a surgeon's scalpel, a pair of scissors, "search and replace" in MSWord, photoshop, and a Swiss army knife (#1).

These are from a critical essay in STAT by Rebecca Robbins (December 8 2017). She and Sharon Begley, the senior science writer at STAT, evaluated each analogy based on three criteria: creativity, clarity, and accuracy. You may read the results here.

STAT's Jeffrey Del Viscio and Dominic Smith recently published a visual attempt to show the genetic complexities involved in making the invisible visible and they hope understandable. Take two minutes to view their animation.

CRISPR is short-hand for Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindrome Repeats. There is a history of CRISPR at the Broad Institute website.