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You don't need a ridiculously expensive rig to find that in physics, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment

laser pointer plus a sharp enough carbide wheel

(trained as a chemist, grad school in biostats & genetics, now mostly design experiments & clinical trials... I have physics envy, except I don't envy their funding models!)




The double slit experiment is purely random, not unknowable. There is a large difference. In Bio, we will some day conceivably know enough to get to the point where we can build up stat models like the double slit experiment. I'd say that the double slit experiment is still leaps and bounds a better starting point than anything we have in bio and only took ~2 decades to finally parse out. Bio has been chugging along since Watson for ~8 decades before we finally got CRISPR and could really do anything about DNA.


Cre-Lox systems predate CRISPR/Cas9 or CRISPR/Cfp1 approaches by quite some time. If one exists for the system you want to study, they also tend to work better. (floxing the original mouse is, however, substantially harder)

I don't think it's entirely accurate to say that conditional editing of DNA is a new thing. The ready accessibility and combinatorial possibilities, yes, but for targeted conditional knockouts, floxing mice has been a thing for about 20 years now.


Crispr is definitely not the first technology for manipulating the genome.




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