George Church's Changes

Harvard Magazine says the university's George Church and MIT's Joe Jacobson are among those researchers who have "shifted their focus from passively reading genomes to actively 'writing' and 'editing' them in specific ways." In discussing his group's search-and-replace style approach to genome editing — which the team described at length in a July Science paper — Church tells Harvard Magazine that he and his colleagues are "speeding up evolution." He later adds that the team's eventual goal is to "change every base pair. …. If you select for what you want, the end product is exactly what you want."