Snakes and mice don’t look alike. But much of what we know about skin colouration and patterning in vertebrates generally, including in snakes, is based on lab mice. However, there are limits to what mice can tell us about other vertebrates because they don’t share all of the same types of colour-producing cells, known as chromatophores. For example, snakes have a type of chromatophore called iridophores that can generate iridescent colours by reflecting light.
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Published on: 3 Feb 2023
In the wake of the announcement in China last November of the first ‘CRISPR babies’, Prof. Bartha Knoppers and researcher Erika Kleiderman from McGill’s Centre of Genomics and Policy (CGP) have published a commentary article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on the use of CRISPR gene-editing techniques.
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Published on: 28 Jan 2019
I talked this over with McGill University medical ethicist Jonathan Kimmelman, who specializes in the risks of medical experiments and has written a book about them centered on the Jesse Gelsinger case. Of course, he says, money isn’t the only thing that might prevent medical researchers from being perfectly objective -- there’s the desire to be heroes, to beat rivals, and to help patients. A bigger concern is the fact that whatever is driving scientists, they can have blind spots just like everyone else.
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Published on: 23 Jan 2018
By Tod Hoffman, Lady Davis Institute
Research reveals that even a tiny mutation can allow the HIV virus to become resistant to therapies using the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing platform
Published on: 8 Apr 2016
By Vincent C. Allaire
Newsroom
Human genome editing for both research and therapy is progressing, raising ethical questions among scientists around the world.
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Published on: 21 Jan 2016
