Last month, the French biologist Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her work on Crispr-Cas9 - or “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats - Crispr associated protein 9”.
Colloquially called "genetic scissors", this technique of genome manipulation allows DNA to be cut in a radically more efficient and economical way than before.
If the French scientific institutions were immediately delighted with this award, their relationship to this technology is in fact much more complex.
And the fact that Emmanuelle Charpentier has spent most of her career abroad, in Germany in particular, is probably no coincidence.
When a team of Chinese scientists published in 2015 the first results on the use of Crispr-Cas9 in human embryos, an international meeting was also organized in order to deal with the ethical issues raised by this work, and more generally by the use of Crispr-Cas9
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