“The Breaker Code”: Jennifer Doudna and how CRISPR can revolutionize humanity

When Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year, there was no black tie ceremony in Sweden. Due to the pandemic, she took the medal in the backyard.

Correspondent David Pogue asked Doudna, “Let’s limit ourselves to what’s really important: where do you keep your Nobel?”

“Well, let the truth be told, I have a reply in my house, just a small frame and I have the real medal hidden in a safe,” she replied.

Doudna is a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. She and her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2012 Nobel Prize for their work on a scientific breakthrough that is often described in words as “miraculous”: the gene editing technique known as CRISPR and the acronym 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 would see a tube of colorless liquid,” Doudna said.

Two tubes, actually. The first contains molecules that have been designed to bind to a specific gene in the cells of a living thing – a specific part of its DNA. The proteins in the other liquid cut the DNA at that point. “It’s like a zip code that you can address to find a certain place in the DNA of a cell and, literally, like scissors, to make a fragment,” Doudna said.

Cutting DNA like that usually disable a gene. We can deactivate a gene that gives us a disease or we can close the gene that limits the amount of cashmere goat in the fur or the amount of muscle that grows a beagle.