Seedless Blackberries and Cherries That Grow on Bushes Vie to Be the Future of Food

With decades of work and a fair amount of luck, you might achieve one of those goals.

But a North Carolina startup called Pairwise is using the gene-editing technology called Crispr to try to achieve all those goals at once, crafting seedless, thornless, higher-yielding blackberry plants—and in a matter of years rather than decades.

That’s the promise of modern genomics: introducing speed, precision, and the ability to solve multiple problems at once to the glacially slow, haphazard, one-tweak-at-a-time world of crop breeding.