CRISPR or are we already Crisp enough?

1)   

 About 2012, building on closely related discoveries of at least 10 other scientists, Jennifer Doudna, "The Dude," apparently came up with a final piece of knowledge to revolutionize gene manipulation.  Emmanuelle (we've heard that name before at the movies) Charpentier did about the same.  This is my first and could be my last (see Covid 19 post) writing about CRISPR, clustered repeating interspaced sexy pleated rayon.   Sometimes you don't know something, but you can tell what you know or say is wrong.  It's really some other kind of cluster, and I've heard the proper term seven times lately and seen it written out, but my brain is 72 years old and doesn't hold new terms the way it did in 1995.

2)

Crispr--no, I'm not going to capitalize all the letters all the time--is the most effective method so far of editing genes, taking pieces out and putting other pieces in.  Within five years after Doudna/Char published their discoveries, Victoria Gray of Forest, Mississippi, a pleasant black woman with what I'd call a cutesy Southern accent, volunteered for Crispr gene therapy for her sickle cell anemia/disease.  Didn't seem to have much to lose.  Though some other volunteers in the study weren't as lucky, her life has changed so much for the better she can now work at Walmart.  In the age of leaders like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, this is not to be grumbled about.

3)

Sideline about President Trump:  Some New York woman wrote some book and Terry Gros interviewed her.  "Did you ever meet Donald Trump?" asked Gros "and what was your impression of him?"  "I haven't met him, but in the 1980s he was a real estate developer, and he was thought of as a joke.  No one took him seriously.  Even other real estate developers didn't take him seriously.  And this was before he destroyed the Western World." 

I assume they didn't take him seriously somewhat because he said one thing and did another, couldn't be relied on as a stable entity.  We know he had the habit of refusing to pay sub-contractors when he did  develop something.  His word was not good.  That hasn't changed, and it's an issue of character.  A national leader needs to have good character, and not only because the children will imitate his example.  He could accidentally cause a nuclear exchange by getting into a shouting match trading insults with some idiotic leader of North Korea.   I'd have impeached him for increasing the odds of nuclear war and we'd have been safer for it.

4)

There have been many versions of fiddling with the material that seems to make us humans and other living things what we are, physically.  A hundred years ago, a great friend of Paramhansa Yogananda, Luther Burbank of Santa Rosa, California, crossbred plants to create new varieties that had more desirable traits.  This had been going on in some form probably for thousands of years, but Burbank found ways to really do it better, was grandly successful.

5)

Before Burbank, an Austrian? priest named Gregor Mendel started figuring out the laws of inheritance.