The Nine Breakthroughs of the Year
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The theme of my second-annual Breakthroughs of the Year is the long road of progress. My top breakthrough is Casgevy, a gene-editing treatment for sickle-cell anemia. In the 1980s and early 1990s, scientists in Spain and Japan found strange, repeating patterns in the DNA of certain bacteria. Researchers eventually linked these sequences to an immune defense system that they named “clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats”—or CRISPR. In the following decades, scientists found clever ways to build on CRISPR to edit genes in plants, animals, and even humans. CRISPR is this year’s top breakthrough not only because of heroic work done in the past 12 months, but also because of a long thread of heroes whose work spans decades.
Sometimes, what looks like a big deal amounts to nothing at all. For several weeks this summer, the internet lost its mind over claims that researchers in South Korea had built a room-temperature superconductor. One viral thread called it “the biggest physics discovery of my lifetime.” The technology could have paved the way to magnificently efficient energy grids and levitating cars. But, alas, it wasn’t real. So, perhaps, this is 2023’s biggest lesson about progress: Time is the ultimate test. The breakthrough of the year took more than three decades to go from discovery to FDA approval, while the “biggest” physics discovery of the year was disproved in about 30 days.
1. CRISPR’s Triumph: A Possible Cure for Sickle-Cell Disease
In December, the FDA the world’s first medicine based on CRISPR technology. Developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, in Boston, and CRISPR
