What genome editing tech has done for the world, so far

our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed Jennifer Doudna knew CRISPR would be powerful the moment she discovered it. She never expected it would lead to this. Doudna, Ph.D., Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, has devoted her scientific career to revealing the secret life of RNA.[…] Jennifer A.

Fourteen years after co-inventing CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna checks in on what it's become. The Nobel Prize-winning biochemist walks through the technology's biggest moments — the 2012 discovery, the 2018 CRISPR babies announcement, and today's $2 million but functionally curative therapy for sickle cell disease — alongside newer applications like reducing methane emissions from cattle farming. Doudna also admits there is unfinished work ahead: the cost still keeping that cure out of reach for most patients, and the responsibility of guiding a technology she describes as a genie that can't go back in the bottle.

JENNIFER DOUDNA:I do remember the day we were talking about an experiment with CRISPR and we recognized right then that, you know, CRISPR was going to be a powerful technology. I went home and I was cooking dinner for my son, who was about six years old at the time. I was standing at the stove, I was boiling water for spaghetti or something like that, and I just burst out laughing in my kitchen and my son looked at me and he said, why are you laughing, mom?

And I said, because bacteria have this crazy protein. They've evolved this incredible system for DNA binding and cutting. We knew right away that the technology would be exciting, but I did not anticipate how much my life would change.

We published the paper reporting this finding in the summer of 2012. I started getting notes from my colleagues in different parts of the world, and they were starting to use CRISPR in different kinds of cells and organisms. So it was clear that there were a lot of people that had read this paper and recognized immediately the potential of this.

So CRISPR, it's a great acronym, but what does it mean? CRISPR, it stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. I like to use the analogy of a word processor.