C-O-N

I have a bit of a technical question that I've always wondered about. How did you sleep on the moon? Was there enough room to lay down on the floor of the LEM or were there hammocks or something that you would hang up?

No and on a fully grown person, it's probably not possible. CRISPR is fantastic at breaking genes. That's because non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), the system cells usually use to repair a double stranded DNA break, is a bit crap in that it tends to make mistakes. These mistakes are either adding nucleotides where they shouldn't be or deleting some that should be there. These insertions and deletions are called indels and are fantastic for researchers because any indel anywhere in a protein coding sequence will pretty much ruin the protein.

However, NHEJ isn't the only method cells have to repair DNA damage. They also have homology directed repair (HDR). HDR is way better than NHEJ in that it doesn't produce small indels. The problem is i requires a template. Luckily we can provide that template. All you need is a bit of DNA that matches both sides of the DNA brake and have it bind to both sides and HDR will take over repairing the DNA using the template.

At first sight that looks great! Just make sure the cells do HDR and you're set. Problem is there isn't a way to either guarantee that the cell will do HDR over NHEJ and even if it does, most of the time it gets the template a little bit wrong. That means if you try to use CRISPR to add a complete functional gene into a person, you may get a few cells that work, but the vast majority are going to have some random bits of DNA added to them along with everything you need to make protein from it. This will almost certainly do more harm than good. The power of CRISPR is doing this to a single cell that's just a fertilised egg. That way you can select only the cells that have successfully taken your modification and let them develop into an entire organism.

I actually work with CRISPR so if you have any questions about the way it works I'm happy to answer them.

It's not really true anymore that it's a male dominated field though. At least in Australia where I am in the biological sciences, 70% of early and mid career researchers are female. I am the only man in my current lab and only had one male colleague in the lab where I did my PhD. It's true that late career is still male dominated, but on the whole it's just not true to say the sciences are an incredibly male dominated field any more. And yes I can provide sources for this.