Off Target CRISPR Report Retracted
The world is poised to hate gene editing technologies, much like they hated refrigerators, cars, open heart surgery and in vitro fertilization. There has not be a revolutionary technology yet that consumers haven't rejected first, and asked questions later. Except stuff Apple sells. So when a paper came out last year claiming massive off-target effects of CRISPR-based gene editing, the critics went ballistic. The scientific brain trust at Mercola.com jumped on the news story, as to the biotechophobe the genetic sky was falling. But to the rest of us we looked carefully at the paper and had a lot of questions. Mostly, it appeared that what the researchers were calling "off target changes" were not changes from gene editing at all, but instead were just natural sequence variations found between mice. Bee. Eff. Dee. One year later, the paper has been retracted . But the damage has been done. This revolutionary technology now gets a sideways lo