#jasons

And I've seen the tag "no beta, we die like Jason" which first of all, evil rude fuck you for that

But it did make me realize I have two dead jasons on two different fandoms that I love?? What the fuck

Jason Todd, of course

But also JASON MOTHERFUCKING GRACE

CRISPR news always feels like an incredible movie unfolding... only its real life.

This story mentions efforts by the CIA, DARPA, and even the JASONS to tackle the threats that CRISPR technology could potentially impose.  Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613309/the-search-for-the-kryptonite-that-can-stop-crispr/ Read the full story at the link^ I tried to pull the synopsis here, but the entire story is fascinating.  “In September 2016, Jennifer Doudna called a new colleague named Kyle Watters to her office. By then, the University of California, Berkeley, biochemist was famous as the coinventor of CRISPR. The invention of the fast and versatile tool to edit genes had vaulted her to global notoriety and to considerable wealth. She was the founder of several startup companies and had collected millions in science-prize money.

Ominously, though, as Doudna has recounted, she was haunted by a dream in which Adolf Hitler appeared, holding a pen and paper, requesting a copy of the CRISPR recipe. What horrible purpose could Hitler have? Doudna, in her retellings of her dream, didn’t say...

… if scientists learn to deliver gene editors inside people’s bodies, what’s to stop a madman, terrorist, or state from employing CRISPR to cause harm? People imagine personalized attacks that would strike only at certain ethnic groups or super soldiers edited to feel no pain… 

…in 2016, the US intelligence agencies had designated gene editing as a potential weapon of mass destruction. That September, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had jumped in, putting out a call for new ways to control or reverse the effects of gene-editing technology. The program, called Safe Genes, would end up with a budget of more than $65 million, making it one of the largest sources of cash for CRISPR research, aside from biotech startups developing new genetic treatments. One problem, as DARPA saw it, was the lack of any easy-to-use countermeasure, undo button, or antidote for CRISPR. And the more powerful gene editing becomes, the more we might need one—in case of a lab accident, or worse. As UC Berkeley put it in a 2017 press release after Doudna, with Watters’s help, claimed part of the big DARPA contract, the university intended to build tools to counter bioterrorism threats including “weapons employing CRISPR itself.”

CRISPR weapons? We’ll leave it to your imagination exactly what one could look like. What is safe to say, though, is that DARPA has asked Doudna and others to start looking into prophylactic treatments or even pills you could take to stop gene editing, just the way you can swallow antibiotics if you’ve gotten an anthrax letter in the mail. Scientists under Doudna’s project say they are set to begin initial tests on mice to see if the rodents can be made immune to CRISPR editors. Anti-CRISPR By the time Doudna drafted her proposal to DARPA, other scientists already had one big clue for how to stop CRISPR. In the ancient struggle between bacteria and the viruses called phage that infect them, phage had developed their own antidotes to CRISPR. In fact, their genomes, it’s been found, harbor the ability to produce what is essentially CRISPR kryptonite—small proteins exquisitely tuned by evolution to disable the gene-editing tool. Scientists call these molecules “anti-CRISPRs.”…

The number of labs studying such defenses is smaller than the number working with CRISPR. But anti-CRISPR is becoming a booming field in its own right. More than 40 anti-CRISPR proteins have already been found, many by Doudna’s lab. Other teams are having early success locating conventional chemicals that can inhibit CRISPR as well. Today, Amit Choudhary of Harvard Medical School, in Boston, also with funding from DARPA, reported he had found two drugs that prevent gene-editing when mixed with human cells.… A biosurprise The advent of the CRISPR tool starting in mid-2012 surprised scientists. Essentially overnight, ham-fisted ways of genetic engineering were replaced by a cheap, versatile, and programmable means of changing DNA inside any living thing. Forecasters whose job was to anticipate new dangers “totally missed” CRISPR, says Renee Wegrzyn, the biodefense scientist who runs DARPA’s program. The humbling failure to see the future quickly morphed into a “critical urgent issue for national security.”

That’s because researchers, doctors, and startups backed by venture capitalists began a race to learn how to deploy CRISPR inside plants, animals, and humans, using viruses, injections, nanoparticles, or electrical shocks. And the better they got at it, the more realistic some sort of novel biothreat could become… In her talk, Wegrzyn said the danger of CRISPR was obvious from how scientists were already using gene-editing to make mice sick by snipping important genes. “I don’t think you need to be a biosecurity expert to recognize that there is a need for scrutiny when you look at a tool that can both cure and cause disease,” she told the California gathering. “If we need to shut down a gene editor immediately, we just don’t know how to do this.”

There’s still no agreement about how dangerous CRISPR could be in the wrong hands. “Red team” exercises sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency over the summer of 2016, where a group of analysts called the Jasons were asked to dream up their worst ideas, didn’t settle the question. Later, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, at the request of the Department of Defense, produced an entire ranking of possible threats from synthetic biology, putting CRISPR weapons toward the middle of the pack. The military said it saw no imminent danger to soldiers.

Doudna agrees that CRISPR’s dangers should not be overblown. “I get these questions a lot about CRISPR systems and nefarious uses, and my feeling is that I am no more or less worried about CRISPR than other things. Someone could synthesize the smallpox virus,” she says. Similarly, while her research may lead to an eventual gene-editing antidote, her lab’s work with anti-CRISPRs is mainly addressing fundamental biological questions. “I am still at step one,” she says. “How do these work?”