This doesn't mean that doctors suddenly have a cure-all on their hands. They haven't tried CRISPR on real live people, and there's no guarantee that it'd work with every genetic condition under the Sun. The initial test was only 50 percent effective, too. If this gene mending is useful in the field, though, it could do a lot to transform medicine. Doctors could treat the root cause of a genetic disease rather than deal with the symptoms, and possibly wipe it out entirely -- or at least, make it more bearable.

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