The next big thing in gene editing lives inside us.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Jramale. The technology known as CRISPR is considered one of modern biology's biggest breakthroughs.

It allows scientists to edit genes, similar to how you cut and paste text in a word processor. A decade after pioneering CRISPR, Nobel Laureate Jennifer

Dowdna of UC Berkeley is applying it to big problems like chronic disease.

We recently met up at Berkeley's Innovative Genomics

Institute, a cluster of lab stations, researchers, and very loud refrigerators

where CRISPR's being used to edit

micro-biomes. She explained how it's been working with these vast

collections of bacteria and viruses that live on and in our bodies.

Well it's not easy to manipulate micro-biomes. that live on and in our bodies.

Well, it's not easy to manipulate microbiomes,

even though we know that CRISPR came from these organisms,

it turns out that introducing CRISPR back into those bugs is non-trivial, especially because we want to

manipulate all of those bugs at different times.

Non-trivial meaning it's hard to do. Meaning it's hard to do and there's both technology but

also fundamental science to be done to understand which genes need manipulating and then

how to do that.

Mm-hmm.

And you're working on applying this to,

among other things, childhood asthma.

Is it to cure or to alleviate the condition,

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