Hopes for sickle-cell treatment

A new gene-editing treatment for sickle-cell disease and other inherited blood disorders is showing promising signs of success. Some 100,000 Americans, most of them black, suffer from sickle-cell. Its symptoms can include extreme pain all over the body, and the only cure has been a bone marrow transplant from a donor who doesn’t have the disease. The researchers say 10 patients who received the new treatment several months ago no longer need regular blood transfusions or suffer from chronic pain.

“It’s something I prayed for my whole life,” Victoria Gray, one of the patients, tells NBCNews.com. Both sickle-cell and betathalassemia—another blood disorder on which the treatment is being tested—stem from errors in the gene for hemoglobin, the protein that transports oxygen around the body in red blood cells. The new treatment involves removing stem cells from a patient’s blood, using the gene-editing tool CRISPR to chop out the malfunctioning gene, and then reintroducing the altered cells. While the study is ongoing, research co-leader Haydar Frangoul, from the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, says the preliminary results are “extremely encouraging.”

protection from herbivores. Now, reports Smithsonian Magazine, botanists have identified one species that seems to have performed the same trick to hide from humans. Fritillaria delavayi grows on the rocky slopes of China’s Hengduan Mountains and is usually bright green with yellow flowers, standing out from the surrounding gray scree.

The plant has long been harvested for use in traditional Chinese medicine, but in recent years, as demand for the herb has increased, it’s become increasingly hard for pickers to find. Botanists found that Fritillaria delavayi hadn’t disappeared, but had instead developed a camouflage: gray and brown leaves, to match the surface beneath them. By interviewing pickers to determine the areas where the plant was most heavily harvested and measuring how closely the leaves matched those environments, researchers concluded that humans had driven this evolutionary shift. “It’s remarkable to see how humans can have such a direct and dramatic impact on the coloration of wild organisms,” says co-author Martin Stevens, of the University of Exeter in England, “not just on their survival but on their evolution itself.”