CRISPR

“It feels exactly like Waymo, where for 10 years, people have been like, CRISPR's awesome. You're like, it is awesome. It's very, very cool. But now it's like, oh shit, it works.”

“Like, I think even if we do see a boom in cancer drugs, and we hear testimonies from scientists that, oh yeah, like, AI definitely, like, sped me up, like, the ticker tape parade is gonna happen for the scientists. Like, we know Jennifer Duden is named for dis…”

“Because eventually, you're not just going to be sequencing and analyzing DNA, You'll also probably be editing it as well.”

“This is the first time that we've seen this kind of custom CRISPR gene editing for a genetic mutation being applied to a patient in vivo in the blood for a specific target for a specific particular treatment.”

“When people talk about gene delivery, there's like three or four aspects of it that matter, and everybody focuses now on sort of the CRISPR side of it, which is, can you modify a gene? In a cell versus can you target it to the right cells? Will your immune sys…”

“They're fully investing in the things I thought were very important at the time, which was, you know, these large genetic databases coming online and functional genomics. So he was way ahead in the, in sort of the thinking about CRISPR and like the gene pertur…”

“Sickle cell anemia and other things using CRISPR is going to be approved. You're going to eliminate this disease. Eliminate it.”

“I'm going to pick the CRISPR, FDA approved CRISPR treatment of sickle cell anemia. I think that this is just an incredibly important breakthrough.”

“It's barely been 10 years since the concept of CRISPR was discovered and described in the scientific literature. So we went from the initial discovery of CRISPR as a potential use as a medicine, all the way to an approval in just over 10 years. That is lightni…”

“When they're all in a pool, you eliminate all of those artifacts, and all of a sudden you have the ability to measure a genome-wide CRISPR screen, basically, so, 20,000 genes in the genome, all modifying the same cellular background in the same dish with a dif…”

“So I think they will allow you to use CRISPR technologies like they use gene therapies today. To basically correct genetic deficiencies, but not to choose the kind of baby you want, you know, like saying that, okay, I want my eyes, the eyes to be of this color…”

“And the notion that a young person today might live to be 130 is not at all absurd. So I'm very bullish on the science.”

“My best science breakthrough is that this year we actually were able to inject in vivo, so in the body genetic code for CRISPR, two cases specifically. One was to basically reduce the production of this toxic Liver protein in a bunch of folks, and then the sec…”

“With CRISPR and with the messenger RNA and knowing how to use it now, we will be able to solve a lot of problems going forward, which means we're going to be able to keep people alive longer without having to use pharmaceuticals.”

“What about allowing rich people to buy better memory for their kids, but since this technology is not going to be free, it'll encode the inequalities of our society into our species.”

“Josiah Zainer, Runs a store called the Odin, and you can go online and get CRISPR and use CRISPR maybe to regulate the myostatin, so you'll have bigger muscles, things like that.”

“And after Jennifer and Emmanuel discover how CRISPR can be engineered to be a tool to cut DNA, a race ensues to say who can make it work and show how it works in human cells first. And it takes them both six months along with some other labs. It's a race that …”

“We're seeing this platformization, this AWSification of a biological tool chain with things like CRISPR and all of the other modalities that need to stack on top of it so that the next person can view it as a programming problem.”

“This is an enormously important breakthrough because it validated a lot of what CRISPR was beyond a lot of theoretical innovation that that up until now was basically what it was known for. And a lot of investment had gone into companies that were trying to do…”

“We are seeing now improvements in delivery mechanisms like Carti, in implementation mechanisms like CRISPR, and all of these things set us up, I think, for a renaissance in biotech”

“Compared to old tools, engineering was cut down from a few months to a matter of weeks or days.”

“Some Cas nucleases are much smaller, come from less immunogenic strains, are more precise, or have new mechanisms altogether.”

“Instead of just this pair of molecular scissors that everyone talks about, the biggest recent shift in the field is this push towards making CRISPR a search engine platform of the cell.”

“We can even now directly target and edit RNA bases, opening up the entire field of transcriptomic editing.”

“As we continue to mine new metagenomic data of new species, it's not crazy to think that perhaps even CRISPR itself is by no means the final frontier of genome engineering.”

“So what CRISPR does well, it's often described as editing. It really is damaging, is what it is. It's not really that good at precision editing.”

“Ignoring the fact that if you're in an IVF, PGD clinic anyway. To do your CRISPR editing of your Mendelian disease, you could just do selection for most of these things.”

“Yeah, I think that we want an example of a disease that is very common, and most of the gene therapies are rare, whether they're editing or not, and we want something that's very serious, and certainly HIV falls in that category, So it struck me as a plausibly…”

“And now I think with the advent of things like CRISPR and things that companies like Asimov are doing where they're actually making DNA a design medium. I think it's, we're actually starting to make genetic engineering be an engineer discipline, but I think th…”

“CRISPR is a concept barely registered just a few years ago, and now it's an indispensable tool for drug discovery, for, actually, for understanding biology, as we've seen the cycles of iteration in biology accelerate.”

“As we move biology more and more into an engineer-based discipline, I think we're going to see more powerful modalities like CRISPR.”

“I also think we're going to see a lot of interesting things in the non-therapeutic CRISPR space. So in a therapeutic CRISPR side, there are a bunch of public companies that are going directly after using CRISPR to cure disease. I think it's just the beginning …”

“On this point, you can't stop technology. You can't suppress it. These things are coming. CRISPR is coming to design your baby someday. Driverless cars are coming.”

“So as we advance our ability to deliver gene therapy, as we advance our ability to actually very precisely edit the genes, and only the genes that we need to edit, gene therapy will become applicable to a far broader range of diseases, not just limited to thos…”

“The biggest thing I'm looking at is CRISPR, which is literally changing the world. It scares the hell out of me because of what its potential is. That's the basic gene editing technique that came out of Stanford, MIT, and Harvard, but it's just mind-boggling w…”

“If you think about all the technologies that are in development today, like AR, VR, genomics, and things like CRISPR, if you think about blockchain and cryptocurrencies, these technologies are also being developed on and approaching their iPhone moment, so to …”

“And now I think with the advent of things like CRISPR and things that companies like Asimov are doing where they're actually making DNA a design medium. I think it's, we're actually starting to make genetic engineering be an engineer discipline.”

“What scientists were able to do is they were able to take this video, the pixels from this video, and using CRISPR can coax a bacterial cell to ingest the information and store it in its DNA. And on the right, what you're seeing Is scientists' ability to retri…”

“I'm working on a project. This is the last project that I have at MIT that I can't exactly, I can't talk about what it is, but it's I'll just say it's a very large scale Artwork that is that's using CRISPR.”

“So I think there you'll see less of a regulation barrier because you're not editing the actual genetic code. You're just editing the end product.”