LAUSR

In his 1959 Nobel Lecture, Joshua Lederberg discusses the specific mutagen, an agent that could ‘penetrate to a given gene, recognize and modify it in a specific way’, as the ignis fatuus of genetics, a potentially unobtainable goal that one feels compelled to pursue. While several contenders emerged over the years, it was not until 2012 that Charpentier and Doudna truly realized Lederberg’s goal with their description of an easily programmable RNA-guided DNA endonuclease known as CRISPR Cas9 [1], which when used in combination with a DNA donor template, opened the path to a cure for genetic diseases by precise genome editing [2]. In the final months of the first decade of CRISPR, this editorial reviews the impact of CRISPR technology on respiratory medicine.