Smacking a bell on his desk, George Cachianes summons the class to order. Twenty-six teenage biotechnologists cluster at three tables. Cachianes teaches Principles of Biotechnology — he calls it “Welcome to Graduate School” — to a select group of juniors and seniors at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco.
His Room 22 is not just a classroom, but a functioning laboratory. Its equipment, acquired through grants and donations, can handle tasks such as sequencing DNA and analyzing proteins. But today’s lesson is about a newer technology, a means for altering the genes of any organism — and, potentially, its offspring. It’s called Crispr-Cas9.
George Cachianes shares a laugh with his biotechnology students at San Francisco’s Abraham Lincoln High School. | Ernie Mastroianni/Discover
An elegant tool with an inelegant name, Crispr-Cas9 has electrified the biotech world. Molecular biologists, biomedical researchers, and movers and shakers throughout the life sciences have adopted ...
