Link Salad, the Indistinguishable-From-Magic Edition
-- The Genesis Engine - Amy Maxmen, Wired, Aug. 2015
"THE TRUTH IS, most of what scientists want to do with Crispr is not controversial. For example, researchers once had no way to figure out why spiders have the same gene that determines the pattern of veins in the wings of flies. You could sequence the spider and see that the “wing gene” was in its genome, but all you’d know was that it certainly wasn’t designing wings. Now, with less than $100, an ordinary arachnologist can snip the wing gene out of a spider embryo and see what happens when that spider matures. If it’s obvious-maybe its claws fail to form-you’ve learned that the wing gene must have served a different purpose before insects branched off, evolutionarily, from the ancestor they shared with spiders. Pick your creature, pick your gene, and you can bet someone somewhere is giving it a go."
-- The Night My Daughter Discovered Our Family's Legacy of Depression - Mary Knobbe, Narratively
"While I wait for a phone call back, I wonder. How did this happen? But really I know. It’s me. I’m the one that caused this. I’m the reason behind Leah’s pain. I’m the defect in her genetic code. The starving serotonin pump that’s been torturing me for the last twenty years has finally found its most exquisite form of agony. No longer am I the sole victim. My beautiful, perfect child is now the new target of my broken brain. A brain so hungry that it coded itself into the DNA of yet another prey."
"THE TRUTH IS, most of what scientists want to do with Crispr is not controversial. For example, researchers once had no way to figure out why spiders have the same gene that determines the pattern of veins in the wings of flies. You could sequence the spider and see that the “wing gene” was in its genome, but all you’d know was that it certainly wasn’t designing wings. Now, with less than $100, an ordinary arachnologist can snip the wing gene out of a spider embryo and see what happens when that spider matures. If it’s obvious-maybe its claws fail to form-you’ve learned that the wing gene must have served a different purpose before insects branched off, evolutionarily, from the ancestor they shared with spiders. Pick your creature, pick your gene, and you can bet someone somewhere is giving it a go."
-- The Night My Daughter Discovered Our Family's Legacy of Depression - Mary Knobbe, Narratively
"While I wait for a phone call back, I wonder. How did this happen? But really I know. It’s me. I’m the one that caused this. I’m the reason behind Leah’s pain. I’m the defect in her genetic code. The starving serotonin pump that’s been torturing me for the last twenty years has finally found its most exquisite form of agony. No longer am I the sole victim. My beautiful, perfect child is now the new target of my broken brain. A brain so hungry that it coded itself into the DNA of yet another prey."