Molecular genetics has finally arrived!

"In the end, I suppose the thing to do is compare 2010 to 2019. How did life change most drastically? Smartphones and social media are candidates, especially if you take a global view. Travel didn’t change much. Despite lots of hype, entertainment didn’t change much. War became noticeably less effective except against neighboring countries. CRISPR was probably the most important genuinely new invention. Racial justice gained a higher profile, but nobody did much about it. Religion continued to slowly decline, but that was the latest of a longtime trend. Wall Street mostly just regrouped after the Great Recession."

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/12/the-aughts-were-the-decade-of-the-smartphone/

CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats--aren't you sorry you asked?) refers to a bacterial genetic mechanism to defeat viral infections that has been hijacked for gene editing. And now it rates a mention by a blogger for Mother Jones. I hate that so much of biomedical research is oversold to the public, but I came of age at the dawning of the cloning era, and this is the most transformative gene therapy I can recall (yes, even more transformative than CAR-T cancer therapy). I'm glad I got to live to see this day.

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