When Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year, there was no black-tie ceremony in Sweden. Because of the pandemic, she picked up the medal in her backyard.
Correspondent David Pogue asked Doudna, “Let’s take a look at the really important thing: where do you keep your Nobel Prize?”
“Well, honestly, I have the replica in my house, just a small frame, and the real medal I put in a safe,” she replied.
Doudna is a biochemist at the University of California at Berkeley. She and her collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2012 for their work on a scientific breakthrough often described with words like ‘miraculous’: the gene editing technique known as CRISPR, and short for Clustered Regularly. Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.
Pogue asked, “What does it look like in the real world? Is it a computer? Is it software?”
“It’s not a computer and it’s not software. If you looked at it in my lab, you’d see a tube of colorless liquid,” said Doudna.
Two tubes actually. The first contains molecules designed to attach to a particular gene in the cells of a living being – a specific part of its DNA. The proteins in the other liquid cut off the DNA at that location. “It’s like a zip code that you can address to find a particular place in a cell’s DNA and literally cut it like a pair of scissors,” said Doudna.
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Usually cut DNA this way switches off a no. We can turn off a gene that gives us disease, or turn off the gene that limits how many furry goats grow, or how much muscle a beagle grows.
The next step is much more difficult: swapping one different DNA sequence, replacing it with something we made ourselves. We will be able to rewrite the ones of a plant, animal or person.
Walter Isaacson is the author of best-selling books about Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve JobsHis latest, “The Code Breaker” (published by Simon & Schuster, part of ViacomCBS), is about Jennifer Doudna and her work on CRISPR. “When I started this book, I thought, ‘Okay, biotechnology and CRISPR, it’s the most amazing thing that’s happening in our time,’” Isaacson said. And then towards the end I realized that I was understatement the case.”
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Since Doudna published her paper in 2012, a lot has been going on in the CRISPR laboratories of the world. Scientists have grown more nutritious tomatoes and created a wheat that does not contain gluten. Clinical trials are underway to treat some cancers using CRISPR techniques.
Those medical treatments show the most overwhelming possibilities of CRISPR. About 7,000 human diseases are caused by gene mutations that we can theoretically just cut out. They include muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, and sickle cell disease, a blood disorder that causes debilitating pain, infections and premature death. It affects about 100,000 Americans, including Victoria Gray, a Mississippi mother of four who became the first American to be treated with CRISPR-fixed genes.
In the year since the experimental treatment, she has not experienced severe pain or hospitalization.
Of course, like any revolutionary technology, this one has a dark side, with predictions of redesigned human beings. Pogue asked Doudna, “The headlines are always about, ‘Oh, what you let go are designer babies!’ For example, people will say, “I want blonde, blue-haired, super smart, super muscular.” Is that real? “
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Well, yes and no. Usually no, ”Doudna replied. “We don’t really know which genes need to be edited for the kind of traits you mentioned. And I suspect we’re talking about dozens, if not more, genes that need to be modified. That would be technically very challenging, so I guess not that we ourselves are on the cusp of a world of CRISPR babies.
“But it’s close enough, in the sense that the technology could fundamentally make this possible, that I think it’s critical that we have a discussion about it.”
Isaacson said, “Most of the people who have studied this say you have to draw a line between what is medically necessary – in other words, trying to make sure people don’t get sickle cell anemia or Huntington’s disease – but it’s a blurry line. I mean, if you try to improve someone’s memory to make sure they don’t have Alzheimer’s, you’re also improving their memory. ”
There is also a difference between editing one person’s genes, like Victoria Gray’s, and making changes that are passed on to their children.
In 2018 a Chinese doctor has processed the embryos of three Chinese babies so that they and their offspring would be resistant to the HIV virus. Scientists all over the world condemned him for being a villain.
“In China, he was initially celebrated for about a day as the first person to create designer babies,” said Isaacson. “But even the Chinese were shocked by what he did, and he was eventually tried and placed under house arrest.”
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Since that event, Doudna has hosted a series of international conferences designed to elaborate ethical guidelines for the use of CRISPR so that agreements are in place before a disaster strikes.
“Gene editing is a fantastic technology that I think will ultimately help a lot of people around the world,” she said. “And so for me it is more a matter of management.”
Over the past year, some of the most prominent CRISPR labs, including Doudna’s, have turned their attention to another scientific holy grail: protecting us from COVID, starting with work on a low-cost, rapid at-home COVID test.
Doudna said, “I imagine I have small CRISPR-based devices so people can come to work, spit in a tube, and get a response in 30 minutes and tell them whether to quarantine or not. “
Meanwhile, scientists around the world are exploring the amazing potential of CRISPR to improve our lives.
Pogue asked Isaacson, “Do you think the biotech revolution will be as big and impactful as the digital revolution?”
“I think the biotech revolution will happen ten times Lake more important than the digital revolution because it allows us to hack the code of life, “he replied.” And we shouldn’t be afraid to use this technology to make ourselves healthier. “
READ A BOOK EXCERPT: “The Code Breaker” by Walter Isaacson
For more information:
- “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race” by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster), in hardcover, eBook, and audio format, available on Amazon and Indiebound
- Walter Isaacson, Tulane University
- Doudna Lab, Berkeley, California.
- Innovative Genomics Institute, Berkeley, California.
- CRISPR Therapeutics, Cambridge, Mass.
- Sarah Cannon, Nashville, Tennessee.
Story produced by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Steven Tyler.
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