Ep. 21: “Getting Crispy About CRISPR!”

On episode 21 of "Interesting Stories In The History Of Diagnostics", Mickey Urdea is asking: "Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?" That's no puzzle - it's a palindrome! Yes that's right, he's discussing CRISPR, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, the hallmark trait of a bacterial defense system that forms the basis for CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technology, which can be programmed to target specific stretches of genetic code and to edit DNA at precise locations, as well as for other purposes, such as for new diagnostic tools. This episode not only serves to detail the historical timeline of CRISPR technology (which is certainly interesting on its own), but to then illustrate how the technology actually works and where the field is going. So don't get burnt to a crisp, just get CRISPR!