A Scientific Discovery That Makes Genetic Engineering Safer To Use

Genetic engineering is tricky business. Its potential for good, for bad, and for unintended consequences is almost unlimited. How do you realize the good while avoiding the bad? In 2012 a research team led by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published a landmark paper that gave scientists a gene-editing tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 that makes it much easier to turn genetic engineering's potential into reality. On December 29, 2016, a team led by Benjamin Rauch and Joseph Bondy-Denomy at UC San Francisco published a paper in the journal Cell that may well turn out to equally groundbreaking.