Homologous recombination is a precise editing method effective over large distances, unlike CRISPR which tends to be imprecise and limited in scope.

“Another one that dates back two decades before CRISPR is SSAPs or lambda red as it's sometimes called is a way of getting precise editing. And that's what we actually used to...around 2009 to make libraries of billions of edited cells in a day, a single person. That shows some of the power. And the other evidence of its power was that that was...the first completely recoded genome was done mostly a combination of SSAPs and recombinases, which is also very precise. CRISPR was basically a hatchet, and I sometimes call it genome vandalism.”