“IT HAS not escaped our notice”, wrote James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, “that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism.” What they had discovered was the structure of DNA and the way its halves matched up. It was a classic of understatement, for what they had noticed would revolutionise biology.
With similar self-restraint, results published in Science, in 2012, noted “considerable potential for gene-targeting and genome-editing applications”. In fact, the study revealed a simple method allowing scientists to tinker, at will, with the genomes of animals and plants. It threw open the doors to a new and egalitarian era of genetic engineering—a way to tackle problems ranging from pest control to drug design to the undoing, with military precision, of harmful mutations. What remains to be determined, however, is who can claim to have discovered it.
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