Alireza Edraki spends weekends in the lab. It’s what he does. For the past three years, test tubes full of bacteria have been his constant companions. Not this weekend. “I’m so stressed out that I can’t work,” he says. Edraki is a third-year PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts’ medical school in Worcester. You know Crispr/CAS-9, the gene-editing technology that’s in all the headlines lately? That’s what Edraki works on.

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