Jennifer A. Doudna

This is truly awful, a paper-thin overview of CRISPR technology. If you get your popular science from USA Today, you're well beyond the target audience. I wanted to learn some of the details of the science, some of the tradeoffs of the technology, and some of the dirt on the politics. There's none of that here. I suspect that the book was entirely written by Sternberg, and Doudna was too busy to contribute, because there's no evidence that she was seriously involved.

> There’s even a case to be made that this kind of genetic manipulation is better than breeding. Unlike micropigs, whose health is no different than their normal-size relatives, extensive inbreeding of dogs has had devastating health consequences. Labradors are prone to some thirty genetic conditions, 60 percent of golden retrievers succumb to cancer, beagles are commonly afflicted with epilepsy, and Cavalier King Charles spaniels suffer from seizures and persistent pain due to their deformed skulls.

> Cold-induced sweetening also causes potato chips to brown and take on a bitter taste, which results in a huge amount of waste; processing plants discard 15 percent of their potatoes a year for this reason. Using gene editing, researchers at Calyxt easily addressed the problem in Ranger Russet potatoes: they inactivated the single gene that produced glucose and fructose

> Huntington’s disease, in which the altered gene produces an abnormal protein that completely overrides the effect of the second, healthy copy of the gene. Since the mutated gene dominates the nonmutated gene, simple gene therapy—the addition of another normal copy of the gene using a retooled virus—would have no effect… (mer)

My personal opinion is that CRISPR will eventually be viewed by history through the same lenses through which penicillin & vaccines are now. This book allows you to go on the journey of it's groundbreaking discovery first-hand, which is not something that we normally used to get. Knowing the amount of caution, yet determination to have the ethical hurdles overcomed gives me hope that humanity won't find a way to "screw it up" like it did with nuclear energy. This isn't a book that will captivate you or blow you away, but it's a book that will end up aiding in reaching an outcome to the CRISPR debate the world is about to embark on.… (mer)