Thanks to some bold scientists working in gene-editing, playing God hit the mainstream in 2015. And while there are several ways to snip a nuclease, Crispr is taking all the headlines, due to its cheap price and ease of use. Things fired up in April, when Junjiu Huang, a molecular biologist at Sun Yat-sen University in China, used the technique to edit human embryos. Even though he used fertilized eggs with no shot of growing up, his paper set off a huge ethical debate. This eventually culminated in a December meeting in Washington, D.C., where researchers for the most part agreed to take gene editing nice and slow.
But that wasn't Crispr's only story arc. All year long various researchers kept announcing new applications: Super buff Crispr beagles, Crispr as a cancer treatment, Woolly mammoth genes Crispr'ed into elephant DNA. And the media took notice. Crispr in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Popular Science, Scientific American, National Geographic. And yes, Crispr was even on the cover of WIRED. In case you needed any more convincing that this thing is a big deal.
