I am not a subscriber . Just commented . <| sep |> Hey , johndidthat ! Sorry it was hard to track down ! And many thanks to lorenzollama and Hitch 42 for helping out ! I distribute through the Podomatic website , which sends everything through iTunes . If you ' re looking to get started , you can also find versions of the first five episodes on SoundCloud . Thanks for listening ! <| sep |> kalemne , disciple of iroastypecard . jpg Gkalemne , disciple of iroas MC ! kalemne , disciple of iroas MW ! kalemne , disciple of iroas CD , discipleofiroas yidris , maelstrom wieldertypecard . jpg Gyidris , maelstrom wielder MC ! yidris , maelstrom wielder MW ! yidris , maelstrom wielder CD , maelstromwielder or cardnameSET to call <| sep |> Since quantum theory , which made the transistor , microprocessor , computers , lasers , cell phones and many of the other useful things we are surrounded by today possible , was developed in the 1920 s , the answer to your first question is No . There are other examples as well , as pointed out by others here . It ' s difficult for us to envision now what CRISPR will be used for in subsequent decades . Predicting the future impact of anything is difficult but it is especially so in science . It ' s already had a big impact on research , mostly because it is cheap , precise , and powerful . But most of the hype isn ' t about its potential research applications , its about its use in medicine . What we would like to be able to do is deliver a CRISPRCas or other nuclease system safely to targeted somatic cells , edit a specific sequence , and then inactivate it after it has done its job . This requires very fine spatiotemporal regulation and must be highly accurate offtarget edits could disrupt the functioning of other genes , potentially causing tumorigenesis . One of the biggest problems to solve is how to deliver the molecular machinery to the right place . It ' s all well and good to take cells out of the body , edit them , and infuse them back into a patient ex vivo editing and adoptive cell transfer and this approach has value see CART cells . It ' s much harder , however , to do it all in an animal in vivo , which is necessary to correct large numbers of cells in entire organs for example , treating cystic fibrosis would require editing the CFTR locus in many different cell types in the lungs , kidneys , the pancreas , etc . . But we ' re making progress on this problem all of the time . A large group at the Broad InstituteMIT published a paper in January showing partial amelioration of Duchenne muscular dystrophy symptoms after they delivered a CRISPRCas 9 system designed to edit the gene encoding mutated dystrophin to myocytes in a mouse using adenoassociated virus AAV . No doubt we will get better at targeting and eventually will have demonstrated enough success editing in model organisms to move into human clinical trials . Much of the hype surrounding the application is warranted . If we are able to successfully edit any gene in a human with no offtarget effects and these effects can be temporally regulated and titrated in vivo , our ability to alleviate the burden of genetic diseases is only limited by our understanding of the genetic basis of the disease i . e . , we know that mutations in genes X , and Y are necessary and sufficient to produce it . It should be emphasized that nobody intends to use this to edit the germline . Such changes would have effects on subsequent generations of people and that ' s the sort of thing that gets theologians and philosophers tied up in knots . In some cases , however , like fatal familial insomniathatkills 384841 , it would seem to be a moral obligation to eliminate the mutation to prevent the suffering from being passed on to future generations . As an aside , if the vast therapeutic potential of CRISPR is realized , we owe it all to basic research that was done for no purpose than to figure out how cells work . This is why we fund it .