Anew form of
the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 appears to significantly expand the range
of diseases that could be treated with the technology, by enabling scientists
to precisely change any of DNA’s four “letters” into any other and insert or
delete any stretch of DNA — all more efficiently and precisely than previous
versions of CRISPR. Crucially, scientists reported on Monday, it accomplishes
all that without making genome-scrambling cuts in the double helix, as classic
CRISPR and many of its offshoots do.
News
about this “prime editing” began circulating among CRISPR-ites this month, when
the inventors unveiled it at a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Since
then, “the excitement has been palpable,” said genetic engineer Fyodor Urnov of
the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the research.
“I
can’t overstate the significance of this,” he said, likening the creation of
ever-more kinds of genome-editing technologies to the creation of superheroes
with different powers: “This could be quite a useful Avenger for the
genome-editing community, especially in translating basic research to the
clinic” to cure diseases ranging from sickle cell to cystic fibrosis.
Prime
editing’s inventors, led by David Liu of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Andrew Anzalone, say it has the potential to
correct 89% of known disease-causing genetic variations in DNA, from the
single-letter misspelling that causes sickle cell to the superfluous four
letters that cause Tay-Sachs disease. All told, they report making 175 edits in
human and mouse cells.
New cash machines: withdraw money with veins in your finger Cash machine technology that reads the pattern of finger veins is already available in Japan and Poland By Telegraph Reporters 6:59PM BST 15 May 2014 Cash machines could soon be installed with devices that identify customers by reading the veins in their fingers. The technology is already being rolled out in Poland, where 1,730 cash machines will this year be installed with readers, negating the need for a debit card and Pin. Developed by Hitachi, the Japanese electronics firm, the machines read the patterns of the veins just below the surface of the skin on your finger using infra-red sensors. The light is partially absorbed by haemoglobin in the veins to capture a unique finger vein pattern profile, which is matched to a profile. The technology is used by Japanese banks and also in Turkey, offering “groundbreaking levels of accuracy and speed of authentication”, Hitachi said, which in t...
Will AI replace doctors who read X-rays, or just make them better than ever? As AI moves into medicine, perhaps no one has more to gain or lose than radiologists, the doctors who review medical scans for signs of cancer and other diseases By MATTHEW PERRONE AP Health Writer May 14, 2024, 9:16 AM ET WASHINGTON -- How good would an algorithm have to be to take over your job? It’s a new question for many workers amid the rise of ChatGPT and other AI programs that can hold conversations, write stories and even generate songs and images within seconds. For doctors who review scans to spot cancer and other diseases, however, AI has loomed for about a decade as more algorithms promise to improve accuracy, speed up work and, in some cases, take over entire parts of the job. Predictions have ranged from doomsday scenarios in which AI fully replaces radiologists, to sunny futures in which it frees them to focus on the most rewarding aspects of their work. That tension reflects how AI is rollin...
The City That’s Trying to Replace Politicians With Computers (It’s Working) After sneaking his AI-written water bill into law, Ramiro Rosário says government press-release writers could go, too By Samantha Pearson and Luciana Magalhaes Dec. 22, 2023 8:58 am ET PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil — In a country with a history of corruption and government inefficiency, Councilman Ramiro Rosário has come up with what he believes is a winning strategy to improve the work of politicians: replace them with computers. The 37-year-old legislator in Brazil’s southern city of Porto Alegre passed the country’s first law in November that was written entirely by ChatGPT, the artificial-intelligence chatbot developed by the San Francisco startup OpenAI. The law itself was purposefully boring—a proposal to stop the local water company from charging residents for new water meters when they were stolen from their front yards. It would easily pass, calculated Rosário. One recent day, donning jeans and sneakers...
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