Moneyball Medicine

This week Harry speaks with Richard Fox, a computational biologist whose work at two life sciences startups, Inscripta and Infinome, is helping to automate and vastly scale up the process of engineering an organism's genome to evoke new functions or uncover important genetic pathways.With the discovery of the genetic scissors known as CRISPR-Cas9 in 2012, biologists gained the ability to make precise cuts in the genes of almost any organism. For genetic engineers, what used to be a slow, labor-intensive, manual process was suddenly easy. It was like jumping from a medieval monastery where all the monks write their manuscripts longhand into a world where everyone has a word processor on their desktop. But the first generation of CRISPR technology was still pretty limited. To continue with the word processing metaphor: you could use CRISPR to change individual letters in a text, but you couldn’t use it to modify entire words, sentences, or paragraphs.At Inscripta, Fox helped to turn CRISPR into a fully featured