The Effectiveness of Experience

Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, also known as CRISPR, has has gained increasing prominence over the last few years, and seeing it on the news so frequently made me proud to have researched it last year. When I worked at UTHSCSA’s research labs last summer, I got to learn a lot more about the breakthroughs that CRISPR, specifically CRISPR-Cas9, is having in the world of genomic editing.

Cas9 is an enzyme that functions as system of “molecular scissors”. Simply, this enzyme goes to the location of a mutation for cancer, alzheimer's, blindness, and etc, and cuts out the mutated gene, replacing it with “healthy” DNA. This is proving revolutionary to the prevention of many diseases, some as fatal as cancer,

What really surprised me is how the knowledge of something that was absolutely foreign to me two years ago has suddenly spiked, Now, even my friends and family know about CRISPR-Cas9. It has even been in on the news section of Snapchat! It is truly incredible how information about things like this, associated with my field of study, are gaining prominence, and as I grow as an oncologist, i will have witnessed the birth and development of one of the greatest breakthroughs in medicine.