CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”) is an acronym. It stands for “Clusters of Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.” Don’t worry. I don’t understand that either. The real story about what CRISPR is and what it can do is a lot more interesting than that terminology might suggest. Scientists were smart to come up with a clever, pronounceable acronym. Otherwise, it would be a lot harder to get those of us who are not genetic engineers to pay attention to their research.