The Power and Potential of Gene Tuning
By Fyodor Urnov,
Time
| 08. 12. 2024
After a lifetime in the field of epigenetics, and nearly 20 years after my colleagues and I coined the term “genome editing,” I will be the first to admit that describing the “epigenome”—a marvelous biological process that guides what our genes do—takes a bit of explaining. I find that thinking about the genome and epigenome in terms of music and sound-mixing can be helpful here.
We experience all sorts of music as we go through life, from Bach and Brahms to Laufey and Lizzo. It is remarkable that you can do so many different things musically from just a few basic components. You have a defined set of notes, which can be played separately or together in an enormous number of combinations and time signatures. Those notes can be played at different volumes—some louder, some softer. And finally, those same notes can have different textures. The note of A as played on a violin sounds very different when played by a distorted, death-metal guitar. Each has the same number of vibrations per unit time, but...
Related Articles
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Pam Belluck, The New York Times | 10.17.2025
Before dawn on a March morning, Doug Whitney walked into a medical center 2,000 miles from home, about to transform from a mild-mannered, bespectacled retiree into a superhuman research subject.
First, a doctor inserted a needle into his back to...
By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Zoeann Murphy, The Washington Post | 10.01.2025
MEXICO CITY — When she walked into an IVF clinic in June, Alin Quintana knew it would be the last time she would try to conceive a child. She had prepared herself spiritually and mentally for the visit: She had traveled to a nearby...
By Rob Stein, NPR | 09.30.2025
Scientists have created human eggs containing genes from adult skin cells, a step that someday could help women who are infertile or gay couples have babies with their own genes but would also raise difficult ethical, social and legal issues...