How Gene Editing Is Changing the Way We Treat Genetic Disorders

As a young professor of chemistry at Harvard in the 2000s, David Liu was trying to accelerate evolution.This quest took place on the cellular level. Inside every cell in the body, molecules known as proteins act like tiny machines, carrying out biological functions—their efficiency honed by eons of natural selection. And scientists had discovered ways to engineer proteins that were even more efficient, or were built to fix specific...