Nerdette’s Back To School Special

By Tricia Bobeda, Greta Johnsen
CRISPR is an acronym that stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. In essence, CRISPR a tool that can be used to edit genes.
CRISPR is an acronym that stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. In essence, CRISPR is a tool that can be used to edit genes. Photo courtesy of the Innovative Genomics Institute
CRISPR is an acronym that stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. In essence, CRISPR a tool that can be used to edit genes.
CRISPR is an acronym that stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. In essence, CRISPR is a tool that can be used to edit genes. Photo courtesy of the Innovative Genomics Institute

Nerdette’s Back To School Special

By Tricia Bobeda, Greta Johnsen
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Happy new school year! In this summer-ending back-to-school special, Nerdette hosts Tricia Bobeda and Greta Johnsen take you on two scientific journeys. 

The first involves the cutting edge gene therapy called CRISPR, the eyeballs of both Greta and her father, and a question: If you had a potentially-curable genetic disease slowly damaging your vision, would you volunteer to be among the first humans to have their genes edited?

Then, Tricia and Greta take a field trip to Argonne National Laboratory — the massive Department of Energy research facility right in Chicago’s back yard — to talk with scientists about what they’re working on and what’s new in their fields. Tricia also keeps an eye out for alternate dimensions.

The Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab, located about 20 miles southwest of downtown Chicago. (Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory)

Click on the links above to find and play both of these episodes.

This special programming was produced by Justin Bull.