In the summer of 2014, George Church’s team at Harvard, led by Kevin Esvelt, proposed a way to design and build gene drives with the help of efficient gene editing. In essence, the idea relies on a gene knock-in approach, in which scientists use CRISPR to cut DNA at an exact location and insert a new sequence of letters into the breach. There is one major difference with a gene drive, however: part of the new DNA added in contains the genetic information that encodes CRISPR itself. Like that sci-fi trope of a self-replicating machine, a CRISPR gene drive can autonomously copy itself into new
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