Biology has become my passion over the last year, thanks to my teacher, Mr. Hawkins. I took an AP Biology course with him my junior year in high school and fell in love with the subject. He had a unique way of teaching where he would tell a story about his life and then relate it back to whatever he was teaching that day. I had never had a teacher teach in this way before and I couldn't get enough of it. We would even sit together after school and talk about new scientific studies we had heard about and even designed a few small experiments ourselves. The most interesting thing we would talk about however, was a revolutionary new gene editing tool called CRISPR CAS 9.
CRISPR is short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CAS just stands for CRISPR associated protein 9. That is a mouth full so it is typically just referred to as CRISPR to save time. This new gene editing tool was first discovered in e coli bacteria as a defense mechanism against harmful viruses. Viruses work by hijacking other organisms cells and forcing them to make copies of the viral DNA that they insert into the cell. Bacteria…show more content… Modern medicine has advanced drastically over the past few hundred years, but there are still diseases that we can't cure yet. I say yet because with this new tool, horrible illnesses like huntington's disease might be a thing of the past. Huntington's is genetic condition that causes the breakdown of nerves in the brain. It is nearly always fatal and there is currently no cure, but scientists are trying to engineer a specific CRISPR enzyme to cut out and repair the part of DNA that is causing this condition. There has already been success reversing this disease in mice. With this new technology, countless lives could be saved. Being a doctor was never something I really wanted to do, but pursuing this will allow me to help people while still being involved in the science I love so
