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LISTEN: When you think about gene editing — essentially making customized changes to DNA in medical treatment — you probably don’t imagine high school students doing this work. But one Forsyth County high school has a student lab devoted to it. GPB’s Ellen Eldridge reports.
The bell rings and a hallway eight students wide fills with comfortably dressed teenagers changing classes. Some are carrying milk cartons and snacks as they move through the school’s main thoroughfare.
With about 3,700 students, this is the largest public school in Forsyth County and one of the largest in the state, and Lambert High School has the only or iGEM — International Genetically Engineered Machine — lab in Georgia.
The students in the Lambert iGEM lab may have found a faster way to detect Lyme disease, a tick-borne illness that affects half a million Americans annually. They did it using the revolutionary gene editing technique known as CRISPR…