[eggie]

> Lifespan, disease and the human race is at stake.

CRISPR is just one tiny replaceable part of any therapy-driving genome editing technique. The frenzy around it overstates its importance.

Cas9 is significant as the first RNA-guided nuclease that we learned how to manipulate, but there are probably many more in nature. Hopefully we will be able to construct our own in short order.

We have had very high quality programmable nucleases for a long time. Nucleases are not the principal expense in genome engineering. Further, if you want to be sure that the cuts you make are correct and on-target you might want to take the time to use another system than Cas9/tracRNA.

However, dCas9 (disabled Cas'es) and friends are amazingly novel, in that they allow us to make huge libraries of targeted DNA binding complexes that don't cut DNA, but let us pull particular things to particular places in the genome. This is an incredible boon to certain research threads. For example, see http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867413...