Enter CRISPR. 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.
