From Technology Review.

Though genome editing with CRISPR is just a little over a year old, it is already reinventing genetic research. In particular, it gives scientists the ability to quickly and simultaneously make multiple genetic changes to a cell. Many human illnesses, including heart disease, diabetes, and assorted neurological conditions, are affected by numerous variants in both disease genes and normal genes. Teasing out this complexity with animal models has been a slow and tedious process. “For many questions in biology, we want to know how different genes interact, and for this we need to introduce mutations into multiple genes,” says Rudolf ­Jaenisch, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge Massachusetts. But, says ­Jaenisch, using conventional tools to create a mouse with a single mutation can take up to a year. If a scientist wants an animal with multiple mutations, the genetic changes must be made sequentially, and the timeline for one experiment can extend into years. In contrast, ­Jaenisch and his colleagues, including MIT researcher Feng Zhang (a 2013 member of our list of 35 innovators under 35), reported last spring that CRISPR had allowed them to create a strain of mice with multiple mutations in three weeks.

The IGM forum tried to ask economists to take sides in the end-of-innovation debate by asking if they agreed with

Future innovations worldwide will not be transformational enough to promote sustained per-capita economic growth rates in the U.S. and western Europe over the next century as high as those over the past 150 years.

The most popular answer was “uncertain,” and the next most popular answer was “disagree.” I would note that Tyler Cowen has consistently said that he is bullish on innovation longer term.