This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here. The theme of my second-annual Breakthroughs of the Year is the long road of progress. My top breakthrough is Casgevy, a gene-editing treatment for sickle-cell anemia. In the 1980s and early 1990s, scientists in Spain and Japan found strange, repeating patterns in the DNA of certain bacteria. Researchers eventually linked these sequences to an immune defense system that they named “clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats”—or CRISPR. In the following decades, scientists found clever ways to build on CRISPR to edit genes in plants, animals, and even humans. CRISPR is this year’s top breakthrough not only because of heroic work done in the past 12 months, but also because of a long thread of heroes whose work spans decades. Sometimes, what looks like a big deal amounts to nothing at all. For several weeks this summer, the internet lost its mind over claims that researchers in South Korea had built a room-temperature superconductor. One …