Putting the Fingers On Gene Repair

摘要

Imagine one of your car's headlights winks out, but instead of simply replacing the bulb, you attach a third headlight. That's typically how genetic engineering works today. When molecular biologists want to boost a plant's drought resistance, for example, or repair the cells of a patient with an inherited disease, they paste a new gene into a random spot on a chromosome and hope it does the job. Nobody has yet figured out a good way to directly repair a cell's defective genes.