Home > Work > Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures
1 " Every year about a billion pigs are slaughtered in our seemingly unending appetite for pork and bacon. About half of these are in China so it’s perhaps no surprise that a research facility in China focused its gene editing efforts on this species. "
― Nessa Carey , Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures
2 " If the change introduced by gene editing is one that could have arisen through traditional breeding practices, there should be no need for regulation. "
3 " These are the founder stock of pedigree herds and are far too valuable to turn into meat. "
4 " Essentially, this means that the Food and Drug Administration wants control over animals that have simply inherited genetic changes through perfectly natural breeding. "
5 " The Belgian Blue and Piedmont strains of cattle arose naturally through random mutation of this gene. The same is true of Texel sheep. It’s these ‘natural’ mutations that are commonly reintroduced by gene editing. Two lamb chops, each with the same characteristics. "
6 " For about 60 years type 1 diabetics were treated with insulin extracted from the pancreas of pigs. This wasn’t ideal as the insulin was a relatively minor component of all the proteins in the pig pancreas and required a lot of expensive purification to produce a relatively small amount of the drug. The pig insulin wasn’t quite identical to the normal human version and it wasn’t suitable for some patients. It was also very difficult to ramp up supply quickly when demand increased. In the 1980s, the drug firm Eli Lilly produced and sold human insulin that had been created in genetically modified bacteria. Now, virtually all insulin is made in bacteria or yeast. "
7 " Let’s imagine DNA as a giant zip, where each tooth is one of the four letters of the genetic code. "
8 " This relies on the second component which is a protein that can act like a pair of molecular scissors, cutting across the DNA double helix. These scissors don’t cut randomly; they don’t just flail across the genome. Instead, they only cut where the guide molecule has inserted itself into the DNA. "
9 " The phrase ‘gene editing’ is used to refer to the technology that has developed since 2012, which permits scientists to alter genomes with exceptional precision and ease. "
10 " gene editing leaves no molecular trace at all. "
11 " In this manifestation of gene editing, it is impossible to distinguish between an organism that was edited by scientists in the laboratory and a naturally occurring variant with the same change in the same letter. "
12 " The rationale was quite simple. If the gene editing resulted in a genetic change that does or could occur in nature, then there’s no need for the regulators to get involved. "
13 " About 99% of the DNA in a human cell is in the nucleus. Half of this is inherited from your mother and half from your father. But about 1% of the human genome is in 1,000 to 2,000 tiny subcellular structures called mitochondria. "
14 " book of life has increased exponentially since Charpentier and Doudna broke gene editing out of bacteria and into the wider world in 2012. "
15 " These are essentially the power generation units of our cells, and we inherit mitochondrial DNA only from our mothers. "
16 " mitochondrial DNA is inherited only through the maternal line. "
17 " We are a pest species, destroying our environments and wiping out vast numbers of other organisms with whom we share this delicate globe. "
18 " A typical American has 40 times the carbon footprint of someone from Bangladesh, for example. "
19 " If we think of DNA as an alphabet, then the complete sequence of those letters in an organism can be thought of as its book. This complete sequence is generally known as the genome. The genes – the DNA sequences that code for Mendel’s invisible units of heredity – can be thought of as paragraphs within that book. "
20 " That’s what Boyer and Cohen’s innovation essentially enabled researchers to do – to cut and paste genomes. "
