[Ads-l] CRISPR (2001)

[Ben Zimmer]

The latest OED update includes the acronym "CRISPR" and gives a first cite
from a 2002 article in Molecular Microbiology. As noted in the Spring 2016
installment of "Among the New Words" in American Speech (covering 2015 ADS
WOTY nominees: http://bit.ly/ATNW91-1), the acronym appeared in an email
exchange in Nov. 2001 between the microbiologists Francisco Mojica and Ruud
Jansen.

2001 Nov 21 Ruud Jansen, e-mail to Francisco J M Mojica, repr in "Discovery
and Seminal Developments in the CRISPR Field," by Francisco J M Mojica and
Roger A Garrett, in _CRISPR-Cas Systems: RNA-Mediated Adaptive Immunity in
Bacteria and Archaea_, ed. Rodolphe Barrangou and John van der Oost
(Berlin: Springer, 2013) 6 What a great acronym is CRISPR. I feel that
every letter that was removed in the alternatives made it less crispy so I
prefer the snappy CRISPR over SRSR and SPIDR.

On Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=cnHuopicWJkC&pg=PA6

I also mentioned the email exchange in a Wall St. Journal column on CRISPR
in January:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/crispr-breaks-out-of-the-lab-1452181544

--bgz

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