A Crisper Story of CRISPR

The Curious Wavefunction is a science blog I follow. The author, Ash Jogalekar, is a talented writer who combines history, science and philosophy in his thoughtful contributions. This week he reviewed the book A Crack in Creation. Jennifer Doudna, one of the authors, is a co-discoverer of CRISPR technology. She might even win a Nobel prize in the near future. As an aside, Jogalekar often profiles famous scientists including many Nobel laureates – his personal take on these individuals and their accomplishments is very refreshing!

From Jogalekar’s review, A Crack in Creation sounds like a book I will enjoy reading. Except he has done such a marvelous detailed job reviewing it, that I actually feel like I’ve gotten all the major highlights of the book strung together in a coherent narrative. Oddly enough, this makes me unmotivated to go out and get the book. It’s like watching a superb movie trailer that highlights all the best parts. Most movie trailers don’t give you enough of a coherent story – they are a teaser to entice you to pay money to go watch the movie.

Since I’ve been thinking about inventing Potions based on science, the CRISPR-Cas9 system might be an excellent ingredient in a magical brew. By editing the genetic information to control transcription and downstream translation of appropriate proteins, a CRISPR-based potion could imbue a certain permanence to its effects. That’s a powerful brew. However I wonder if this would put the apothecaries and potion brewers out of business. A potion with temporary effects seems so much weaker, except that in many cases you probably only want the effects to be short-lived. It would get very annoying to be invisible all the time or looking permanently like someone else thanks to a Permanent Polyjuice Potion.

Then again, maybe there’s nothing truly permanent in a dynamic physical system. DNA mutates. Cells die and need to be replaced. Even rocks change over time, both physically on the outside and chemically on the inside. Isn’t dynamic change what constitutes life, rather than static permanence? Or should that be dynamic stability? That’s how Robert Pascal and Addy Pross would describe the bridge between chemistry and biology in the evolution of life. They argue that thermodynamically stable systems are a subset of a more general group of persistent systems. They describe the Persistence Principle as “change that takes place in the direction of increased stability/persistence”. I could attempt to summarize a crisper version of their article (“Stability and its manifestation in the chemical and biological worlds”, Chem. Commun. 2015, 51, 16160). But I don’t have Jogalekar’s skill or his persistence. Instead, I’ll stop here to keep today’s post crisp!