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This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batser with Dr. Christopher Mason of the Wild Cornel

Medicine School. He's a professor. He's also a geneticist and a computational biologist

and an author. The book is the next 500 years in January life to reach new worlds. We've

started with the generational ship in the 23rd century way back here in the beginning of

the 21st century. What Chris does with his colleagues routinely is they edit DNA and Chris

has given me permission to use the metaphor, edit like a document, like I pull up word

document and cut and paste. Chris, what is CRISPR? What does it do?

Yeah, I think many in your audience have probably heard of CRISPR or read about it. And CRISPR

it stands for a clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. It's a big mouthful.

But what it really is is basically a bacterial immune system, a system that keeps track of

what viruses have bacteria encountered and then remembers. Part of the process is cutting

DNA and embedding DNA and replacing it to remember viruses that a bacteria has seen.

This has been used by many people including Jennifer Doughna and Shepentier. People just

want to know about the prize last year to discover it really a couple decades ago. But then

also to think how do we use this in human cells or perfect the system, including work by

those like Fang Zheng. It basically these kind of immune systems where you can go in and

...