What is CRISPR, and how did it win a Nobel Prize?
Bacterial Scissors
What is CRISPR, and how did it win a Nobel Prize?
Imagine you wrote a very long book — billions of letters long — and somewhere on page 4,000 there's a single typo causing all your trouble. You wouldn't reprint the whole book. You'd just fix that one word. That, more or less, is the dream of CRISPR: a tool that edits the typos in living things. And here's the twist — humans didn't invent it from scratch. We borrowed it from bacteria.
Bacteria, it turns out, have enemies. Tiny viruses hunt them, sneaking inside to make them sick. So bacteria came up with a defense, and it's wonderfully sneaky. When a virus attacks and the bacterium survives, it snips out a little piece of the virus and files it away inside its own DNA — a mugshot in a wanted-poster archive.
