Does the new gene editing method NgAgo work or not? If not, what happened? The answers to both questions seem to depend on who you ask and what you read.
As much as CRISPR has been the revolutionary in the genetic modification technology arena over past methods, could CRISPR itself in the next few years become obsolete having been replaced by other new technologies such as the upstart NgAgo? I doubt it.
The odds for NgAgo making a run in this field may have gone down lately, at least based on a comment left by Sheng Qiang on my original post on NgAgo:
“A war of word broke out on the reproducibility of Han’s work these days, especially on the Mitbbs website. The doubters, represented by Zhouzi Fang, said that no labs have repeated Han’s work, especially the Figure 4 results. The supporters claimed that 20 labs in China already repeated Han’s work, yet no data have been shown to support the claim. The doubters suspect that this is another STAP cell incident for China. To be fair, we should probably give more time for labs around the world to repeat Han’s work, which was trumpeted in the Chinese media to be a Nobel prize worthy scientific breakthrough. Let’s just hope that this will not go down the same path as the STAP cells.”
The Zhouzi Fang mentioned seems to most likely be Fang Shimin (方是民), pictured above, who has a Wikipedia page here that mentions his role as a popular science writer who campaigns against pseudoscience and fraud. It also discusses a number of controversies in which he has been involved. I wonder if he might be like Japan’s juuichijigen who played a key role in uncovering STAP. I don’t know.
I’m hoping to learn more about this NgAgo situation so that we all can better judge what the status of NgAgo research might be. The notion that this could be another STAP-like situation would be very unfortunate, but it seems there’s not enough information now to judge and that’s a serious thing to assert. I agree with the commenter that more time is needed before we can be sure what’s what here.
So what is out there on discussions over NgAgo as to whether it works or not?
I did find this page on an “NgAgo” search onMitbbs (which when Google crudely translates it) seems to fit with what the commenter says about a war of words, but I have no idea if that page is reliable.
I also found this Chinese-language science news site reporting on the NgAgo controversy.
This Google group page on NgAgo also has some researchers reporting it doesn’t work for them, but others said it did work.
Overall, I’d say the jury is out, but it’s clear there are strong opinions both ways on NgAgo.
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