Health Innovation the CRISPR way
" Guys Google #crisper baby", a young colleague texted the team. At first, I didn’t realize the misspelling. In the heat of the moment (no pun intended), I thought the term ‘crisper baby’ was referring to some burn-related injury. The fact that I’m a pediatric emergency physician likely informed that pseudo-deduction. “Not only is the victim a baby, the ‘hashtag crisper baby’ meme is even more unfortunate”, I thought. Although I wouldn’t put it past social media or tabloids to come up with such cringe-worthy titles, I was intrigued. Whenever I’m asked by my post-millennial team to Google something, I generally comply. Likely because of my #FOMO (and for the uninitiated in such 3-4 letter acronyms, that stands for ‘Fear Of Missing Out’). The Googling didn’t take long to make me realize the spelling error. The word was meant to be CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”) , alluding to the cutting edge genomic editing technology that had taken the...