Over the next decade, scientists predict, CRISPR will yield multiple approved medical treatments and be used to modify crops, making them more productive and resistant to disease and climate change.

That also explains why the field of gene editing is moving slowly and deliberately, said Dr. John Leonard, president and CEO of Intellia Therapeutics, which is developing CRISPR-based treatments for rare diseases and cancer.

, for instance, which weakens heart and skeletal muscles and can be fatal, has 100 different variations, each of which would need a different gene edit to correct, said MacKenzie, who also directs The Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF.

The potential for using CRISPR to improve crops is "remarkable," said Ringeisen, and could help secure food for billions of people, even as climate change threatens more floods, droughts and diseases.

The fact that even these areas can be reached is testament to other scientific advances and a deeper understanding of the biology of diseases over the last decade, said Zhang of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, a biomedical research center.

Church, a Harvard Medical School geneticist who always pushes the edge of what's possible, hopes to restore the woolly mammoth with such multiplex gene editing, as well as help people become resistant to dangerous viruses.