<story><title>Crispr now cuts and splices whole chromosomes</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/forget-single-genes-crispr-now-cuts-and-splices-whole-chromosomes</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aaavl2821</author><text>It seems like there has been more hype around synthetic biology in the tech press the last year or so, but it still feels like this field is being slept on a bit.  AGI gets a lot of press but is at best decades out, however one could argue that the potential (for good and bad) of synbio is close to as large, but the tech is much more real.  In many cases it already exists -- we can modify human embryos, the first human study of CRISPR in the US kicked off a few weeks ago -- and in others it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem too far out&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a non scientist and have been excited to learn more about this field, but to find out the most exciting stuff you need to read scientific papers.  The details are the coolest parts IMO.  A bit of self promo here, but I recently wrote a blog post summarizing a Stanford synbio paper in layman&amp;#x27;s terms [0].&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.baybridgebio.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;synbio-laymans-terms.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.baybridgebio.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;synbio-laymans-terms.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Crispr now cuts and splices whole chromosomes</title><url>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/08/forget-single-genes-crispr-now-cuts-and-splices-whole-chromosomes</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gradys</author><text>People who work in or near genetic engineering:&lt;p&gt;CRISPR seems to solve the problem of editing DNA to contain arbitrary human-designed data. Are there major caveats or limitations to this that people outside the field don&amp;#x27;t recognize? e.g. is delivery to the right cells a major obstacle?&lt;p&gt;If editing is solved, it seems like the major remaining problem is designing the right data to insert. I&amp;#x27;d imagine this is a much vaster problem than editing. What are the major subproblems there? What does the frontier look like?&lt;p&gt;Besides the mechanics of editing and designing the sequences to insert, what other major problems stand in the way of sci-fi level genetic engineering?</text></comment>