The New Meaning of Life
This past week Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna were awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry for their work on gene editing relating to something called CRISPR. In order to understand what CRISPR is requires a quick lesson in genetics.
CRISPR is an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. But first the basics. Our genetic material is contained in 23 pairs of chromosomes found in each cell in our body. Half of each pair comes from each parent. Genes are the pieces of DNA inside the chromosomes that define the characteristics of an organism.
