CRISPR, the vaccine and women in science allows us to explore the rapid development of the COVID vaccine and the potential for it's equally rapid modification. The technology that allowed the development of Covid vaccine was brought to us through gene editing technology called CRISPR. With CRISPR, mRNA, or the messenger RNA has been encoded to persuade cells into protecting us from this virus.
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of CRISPR. CRISPR is the acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which is essentially a natural way of altering or replacing DNA sequences in a cell. Needless to say, gene editing is a technology that raises many ethical issues.
If you want to read more about gene editing, we have the following books avaialble:
">Here is a link"> to Terry Gross' interview called : CRISPR Scientist's Biography Explores Ethics Of Rewriting The Code Of Life which is where I heard about this technology.