On July 21, WIRED magazine released its August issue with a cover story on the controversial new gene-editing technique CRISPR. Under the headline “The Genesis Engine,” the cover shows magenta mountains and bright pink trees, and welcome readers to “the post-natural world.”
The online version of the article begins: “Easy DNA editing will remake the world. Buckle up.”
Even with today’s sensationalist scientific journalism, this level of hyperbole was a bit much, and the satirical Twitter hashtag #CRISPRfacts quickly began to trend.
Daniel Macarthur, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute, was the first to suggest that WIRED’s CRISPR article may have gone too far with the tweet:
For those of us with deep social and political concerns about CRISPR – especially about proposals to use it to create genetically modified human beings, which the WIRED article discusses – the Twitter wave was double-edged. It was great to see the hype bubble pierced, but a little worrisome that few of the tweets acknowledged any problem with CRISPR beyond the hype.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. Read full, original post: The Facts Behind #CRISPRfacts and the Hype Behind CRISPR
