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21 " Pasting a particular DNA gene/paragraph from a jellyfish into the genome of a mouse created mice who glowed bright green under ultraviolet light. "
― Nessa Carey , Hacking the Code of Life: How gene editing will rewrite our futures
22 " Genetic engineering in bacteria is easy. Their genomes are small, and it’s very simple to persuade bacteria to absorb new genes. You can generate genetically engineered bacteria in just a few days. "
23 " It’s harder to persuade mammalian cells to incorporate the new genes, for a start. And if you want living organisms such as live mice, rather than just mouse cells in the lab, you need to inject DNA into fertilised mouse eggs, implant these eggs into female mice, and hope the tiny embryos develop and grow OK. "
24 " In 2001 scientists finally had access to the entire genome sequence of humans, our complete 3 billion letters of genetic information. "
25 " Researchers have sequenced the genomes of over 180 other species "
26 " wanting to know about the actions of an entire gene (a paragraph), you actually want to know the precise role of just one letter? After all, that could be the difference between your business card describing you as an ‘interior designer’ or an ‘inferior designer’. "
27 " Can it really be true that one letter in our 3-billion-letter books of human life could be equally important? Well, yes. Boys with just a single letter change in a specific gene6 develop a devastating condition characterised by gout, cerebral palsy, mental retardation and self-mutilation of lips and fingers.7 "
28 " Globally about a third of all food produced for humans is wasted. "
29 " And when you realise that men produce about 1,500 sperm every second,2 the potential for changes to creep in to the genome is obvious. "
30 " For slow-maturing plants like citrus fruits, which also have low fertility, it can take a lifetime to determine if the new offspring have the desired characteristics and will breed true. With modern gene editing techniques, this could be speeded up to less than the time it takes to complete a PhD project. "
31 " lots of other animals, from stick insects to Komodo dragons, have no such absolute barrier. Their females don’t have much trouble producing young without a daddy. So what’s so special about mammals? "
32 " Increasing the yield from crops, ideally without having to use additional expensive inputs, is a key target for agricultural companies and farmers, both commercial and subsistence "
33 " Even more significantly, the strain of E. coli that contained this viral spacer sequence was one that was resistant to the virus. "
34 " creating crops which are robust, better able to cope with environmental stresses and deliver increased yields with no increase in expensive inputs. "
35 " Once they are inside an egg, two sperm nuclei or two egg nuclei can get together just as effectively as an egg and sperm. "
36 " In 2016, over 100 Nobel laureates – about one third of all living Nobel medal holders – wrote an open letter to Greenpeace criticising their position on genetically modified organisms and on Golden Rice in particular. "
37 " dragons and other parthenogenetic organisms are able to reproduce without any input from sperm. "
38 " Basically, if a bacterium survived an assault by a virus, it copied parts of the viral genes and inserted them into its own genome, as the 36-letter spacers in the repeat regions. This gave the bacteria resistance to any subsequent attacks by the same virus. "
39 " The blockbuster paper was published online in Science on 28 June 2012.10 It was a combined effort from the labs of Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, "
40 " Charpentier and Doudna had liberated this technology. It was no longer restricted to the world of bacteria. The two women were highly attuned to the implications of their findings, speculating in the Abstract of their paper that their finding ‘highlights the potential to exploit the system for … programmable genome editing’. But to be truly useful, the system would need to work inside cells. Just seven months later, a paper from the lab of Feng Zhang was published in the same journal, which demonstrated that this new approach did indeed work in cells, including human ones.11 The ability to hack the code of life had truly arrived. "