Not ready for showtime: New research suggests that more work needs to be done establishing the overall safety of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. A paper recently published in Nature reports that while off-target base editing may not significantly occur in DNA, the same cannot be said about RNA. In a surprise finding, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School discovered that CRISPR also caused changes in RNA and were uncertain about its greater effects. http://bit.ly/2ICDf4a
Welcome to the club: Accenture has pulled yet another biotech big gun into its cloud-based ecosystem. Perkin Elmer signed an agreement agreeing to “integrate its big data technology and content into the cloud-based platform’s wider efforts in drug discovery and research.” The company joins the likes of Merck and Pfizer in Accenture’s Life Sciences Cloud Coalition. http://bit.ly/2XulR4S
Shameful practice: A New York Times article highlights the heavy discrimination women researchers continue to experience in top-ranked institutions. In this case, the Salk Institute is being accused of disciminatory practices. The piece focuses on three of the four women working as full time professors who “filed state gender-discrimination lawsuits against the Salk, claiming that an ‘old boys’ club’ of senior faculty restricted their access to funds, laboratory resources and influence. Select male faculty, they said, effectively ran the Institute and were showered with private donations, while women were forced to fire essential staff and were shut out from power.” https://nyti.ms/2XumATE
Love don’t live here anymore: Princeton University has taken the unprecedented step of formally banning all relationships between faculty and graduate students. Some people in other universities applaud the decision and expect more schools to follow. Meanwhile, officials in other school call the measures drastic and “unmerited.” Anything goes when it comes to restrictive behavior in the age of #MeToo. http://bit.ly/2Xu5ipA
This picture speaks for itself:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48011113
IMAGE SOURCE: Creative Commons
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