In this week’s edition of the Perpetual Notion Machine, host and producer Will Cushman talks with Dr. Christian Capitini, from the Department of Pediatrics in the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, about immunotherapy as a tool for cancer treatment. Specifically, Capitini describes a newly approved treatment for certain childhood cancers that applies new […]
Should We Have Designer Babies?
Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, better known by its acronym, CRISPR, is a biochemical technology that allows scientists to precisely edit DNA sequences in cells in a way that the revised genes can be passed on to the next generation. This technology brings with it both promise and dread. On the one hand, it […]
Gene Editing and Cautionary Tales
Science fiction is full of cautionary tales about genetically engineered human beings. That technology is fiction no more. The journal Science recently named the CRISPR-CAS9 gene editing technique the most significant scientific breakthrough of 2015. Jun Jiu Huang of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China used the technique on non-viable in-vitro fertilization embryos to turn […]
