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Showing posts from December, 2018

On Progress and Innovation

Progress. As a society, progress is prioritised and preached at every turn, from a very young age. China is notorious for this, and that's what I'll be covering in this blog post, whether or not this emphasis on innovation and moving forward is actually healthy for our society, with a bit of science sprinkled in for good effect. Taking on a more well-known figure this week. Above is a picture of Chinese biophysics researcher He Jiankui, who has made waves in the scientific community with his work involving a technology known as CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Probably meaningless to most of you, but the general idea is genome editing. His work involved the editing of the genes of two embryos for HIV resistance, as their father is HIV positive, and allowing for the embryos to then develop. The result? Twin girls Lulu and Nana, and worldwide outcry. The concept of CRISPR and its usage in the editing of embryo