Francisco Mojica was not the first to see CRISPR, but he was probably the first to be smitten by it. He remembers the day in 1992 when he got his first glimpse of the microbial immune system that would launch a biotechnology revolution. He was reviewing genome-sequence data from the salt-loving microbe Haloferax mediterranei and noticed 14 unusual DNA sequences, each 30 bases long. They read roughly the same backwards and forwards, and they repeated every 35 bases or so. Soon, he saw more of them. Mojica was entranced, and made the repeats a focus of his research at the University of Alicante in Spain. It wasn't a popular decision. His lab went years without funding. At meetings, Mojica would