A comparison of Margaret Atwood\u27s dystopian text, The Handmaid\u27s tale, and Catherine Helen Spence\u27s utopian text, Handfasted

The two texts which have been compared in this thesis are Handfasted written by the South Australian author Catherine Helen Spence and The Handmaid\u27s Tale written by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Although written nearly one hundred years apart both books follow the tradition of the Utopian genre, although Spence\u27s attitude to the future is much more optimistic than Atwood\u27s. Spence creates a Utopia in her fictional American Columba where the inhabitants, male and female, experience religious and social tolerance. The radical practice of handfasting has given the inhabitants of Columba freedom to change sexual partners every year if they are not satisfied and any children from the union of handfasted parents are privileged in Columba. They are the only ones who are taught to read and write and form the bureaucracy of the Plantation of Columba. Atwood, on the other hand, has created the dystopian Republic of Gilead where any aberrations from the religious and social practices of this mythical American society are brutally punished. The inhabitants of Gilead are ruled by fear and there is not even the pretence of equality in Gilead. Women are required to be silent and, to guarantee that silence, they are under constant surveillance

Genome editing by natural and engineered CRISPR-associated nucleases

Over the last decade, research on distinct types of CRISPR systems has revealed many structural and functional variations. Recently, several novel types of single-polypeptide CRISPR-associated systems have been discovered including Cas12a/Cpf1 and Cas13a/C2c2. Despite distant similarities to Cas9, these additional systems have unique structural and functional features, providing new opportunities for genome editing applications. Here, relevant fundamental features of natural and engineered CRISPR-Cas variants are compared. Moreover, practical matters are discussed that are essential for dedicated genome editing applications, including nuclease regulation and delivery, target specificity, as well as host repair diversity.</p