When we look at Biotechnology as a great emerging field to optimize our economy and industries, We sometime may not be able to see who are the visionary leaders and minds that enabled these technologies and discoveries at our fingertips. CRISPR is one of those Discoveries that are revolutionizing many industries related to Biotech; from Fashion to Polymers, Pharma to Regenerative Medicine, Agriculture to Aerospace and Chemical to Cosmetics industry. This page is dedicated to explore great minds and voices behind CRISPR who are building the path for our generation and many companies to take advantage of such technology to rise life beyond limitation.
John Van Der Oost: Professor, John van der Oost is one of the key leaders in Biotech industry and academia that helped CRISPR Discovery get to it’s main stream in the industry. It is known by many Scientists and leaders that without John , CRISPR-Cas9 would not be that far.
In his video below , Professor van der Oost explains how we can use CRISPR to precisely change defected genes and optimize agriculture product. He also mention that why European committees should take wiser decision toward the fact and not opinion.
Below is the illustrative description of what John explain in the video:
I am John van der Oost a Microbiologist from Wageningen university in the Netherlands. I have been studying CRISPR for over 10 years (2008). What we did in the beginning was to figure out how the CRISPR system works. This success was done by other colleagues all over the world. And since we now, learned alot about it and exactly know how it works, we can exactly uses it as an excellent tool for editing genome in any organism that you like; from microorganism, plants to animal including humans.
It is ridiculous that at EU level, People consider CRISPR tomato more risky than supermarket tomato which was generated by classical Mutagenesis
Prof. John Van Der Oost
At wageningen university we do alot of research on plant and I’m really kind of upset by the recent decision of the European Court of Justice to require very strict and safety test for plants to be engineered for Food Purposes.
The reason for my anger is that if you compare tomato in supermarket with the tomato made by CRISPR, the later can taste better and be resistant against pathogenic microorganism. Now, if you look at the tomato in supermarket, almost 50 million DNA base pair has been changed from wild type which was done by because of classical natural selection, whereas the CRISPR engineered tomato only lost 30 base pairs of same DNA. So we know what we did and we ruined much less DNA of this tomato,
In another example, Wagneingen university also work on potato, and potato is very sensitive to certain bacterial pathogen. There are some closely related species of potato that have resistant gene against the same pathogen. Now if we want to exchange the gene to the sensitive potato which are naturally happen in the between two very closely related species, European Committees does not allow or they require a very strict safety test that on average takes over 10 years. That is ridiculous .