It's important to consider that genome editing tools existed prior to CRISPR and a novel technology is only as valuable as what preceded it. Tools such as zinc-finger nucleases, and TALENs were used and millions of dollars have been invested in developing those technologies to address the same problems for which CRISPR could be applied to. The author also posits that CRISPR could be used to edit any organism, which sounds impressive until you start to break down what that means. Take for instance that >99% of all micro-organisms haven't been cultured, which means that it's a really hard to make them genetically tractable. It's not like you just filter seawater, get some microbes and mix some CRISPR-encoded DNA with them. You would have to know their sequences a priori. And to sequence them, you would have to lyse the cells, generate large amounts of it, sequence it, thus leading to a classic chicken-egg problem.
I'd also like to mention that this technology can be imprecise/precise and due to the combinatorics of the systems you have to design in order to create edits, the ability to reliably edit different parts of the genome can be difficult to predict. It's not perfect. Furthermore, DNA self-replicates, mutates, and has external forces which dictate whether those changes actually should persist in the environment. What if a gene-drive mutates thus rendering it non-functional? The number of mutations that could render such a system to be non-functional vastly outnumbers the number of gene drives you would need to deal with said mutations. Although these types of mutations are unlikely, I'd just like to emphasize that DNA is constantly evolving, unlike say, a series of UNIX commands.
I get that this sounds like I'm saying CRISPR sucks. It doesn't. It's a very valuable technology, which has much to offer. I just want to readily identify the ceiling of the hype.
I'd also like to mention that this technology can be imprecise/precise and due to the combinatorics of the systems you have to design in order to create edits, the ability to reliably edit different parts of the genome can be difficult to predict. It's not perfect. Furthermore, DNA self-replicates, mutates, and has external forces which dictate whether those changes actually should persist in the environment. What if a gene-drive mutates thus rendering it non-functional? The number of mutations that could render such a system to be non-functional vastly outnumbers the number of gene drives you would need to deal with said mutations. Although these types of mutations are unlikely, I'd just like to emphasize that DNA is constantly evolving, unlike say, a series of UNIX commands.
Also, spider-silk producing goats existed before CRISPR was used to create spider-silk producing goats. https://phys.org/news/2010-05-scientists-goats-spider-silk.h.... And so did glow-in-the-dark cats: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-14882008. The only difference is that they didn't have to pay millions of dollars in licensing fees to the Broad Institute.
I get that this sounds like I'm saying CRISPR sucks. It doesn't. It's a very valuable technology, which has much to offer. I just want to readily identify the ceiling of the hype.