[klmr]

> Medical research has advanced a lot with the invention of CRISPR.

You are overestimating the importance of CRISPR. Don’t get me wrong — it is hugely important and innovative. But it’s not even the most important biomedical research innovation of recent years (I’d give that title to RNA-seq or more generally next-gen sequencing technology; but there are several contenders).

But at any rate all the innovations you list are — at least partly — driven by fundamental research in the public sector, not private companies.

[patall]

I beg to differ, it is hard to overestimate the importance of CRISPR. There have been gene editors like zink-fingers or TALENs before but CRISPR is in its total capability is a true breakthrough.

NGS on the other side is more or less a gradual development. While the exact technology may be novel or unique the whole process is not as can be seen by the various competing technologies that existed and still do exist within about 1 or 2 orders of magnitude in pricing over time. And gene expression read-out especially is not that novel at all given arrays existed for some time. Sure, the single applications are cool but quite a few could be done with related technologies.

But sure, in the end its not whether one thing matters more than the another as all together make a great progress.

[klmr]

> NGS on the other side is more or less a gradual development.

While true that’s not really relevant. What’s relevant is that it has completely revolutionised biomedical research. And although CRISPR has the potential of doing the same, it’s just telling that RNA-seq (and related technologies) have become so routine that they’ve effectively spawned new fields of research. Together with WGS (and preceded by microarrays), the new sequencing technologies have led to a revolution of how science is done: because most of the science here is done at a computer. CRISPR, by contrast, is “merely” a new molecular biology tool. A very powerful, for sure, and one that opens up completely new avenues of research. But it doesn’t fundamentally change the way we do science. NGS has.