When David Pellman and Mitchell Weiss made plans to catch up over dinner, they did not expect it to lead to a scientific discovery. Because of this get-together, the pair published a study earlier this year in Nature Genetics showing that CRISPR can cause a cell’s genome to fall into disarray.1
Weiss, a physician scientist from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, was on a business trip to Boston where Pellman works at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The pair are friends and experts in their respective fields; Pellman studies genomic instability during cell division and Weiss is a hematologist who develops gene therapies for sickle cell disease.
“There's something particularly nice about having dinner with your old friend when you're a little relaxed and you're talking about science,” Weiss said. “That's extra special.”
The conversation veered toward CRISPR, a tool that Weiss has been testing to mitigate sickle-cell-causing mutations in patients’ hematopoietic ...
