“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.

The next step is much harder: changing into one different The DNA sequence, replacing it with something we created ourselves. We will can rewrite genes of any plant, animal or person.

Walter Isaacson is the author of bestselling books about Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs. His latest, “The Code Breaker” (published by Simon & Schuster, part of ViacomCBS), is about Jennifer Doudna and her work at CRISPR. “When I started this book, I thought, ‘OK, biotechnology and CRISPR, it’s the most amazing thing that’s happening in our time,'” Isaacson said. “It simply came to our notice then downgrading the case. ”

Since Doudna published her paper in 2012, much has happened in CRISPR labs around the world. Scientists have grown more nutritious tomatoes and created a wheat that does not contain gluten. Clinical trials are treating some cancers using CRISPR techniques.

These medical treatments demonstrate the greatest possibilities of CRISPR. About 7,000 human diseases are caused by genetic mutations that, in theory, we can simply snatch away. These include muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease and sickle cell disease, a blood disorder that causes debilitating pain, infections and early death. It affects about 100,000 Americans, including Victoria Gray, a mother of four from Mississippi, who became the first American to be treated with genes attached to CRISPR.

In the year after receiving the experimental treatment, he did not suffer severe pain or hospitalization.

Of course, like any revolutionary technology, it has a dark side, with predictions of remade human beings. Pogue asked Doudna, “The headlines are always about, ‘Oh, what you unleashed are designer babies!’ For example, people will say, “I want blonde, blue-haired, super-smart, super-muscular.” It is real? “

“Well, yes and no. Most of the time no,” Doudna replied. “We don’t really know which genes need to be modified for the types of traits you mentioned. And I guess we’re talking about dozens, if not more, of genes that should be modified. Doing this would be technically very challenging. So, I don’t think we are on the threshold of a world of CRISPR babies.

“But it’s close enough, in the sense that technology could fundamentally allow this, that I think it’s essential to have a discussion about that.”

Isaacson said: “Most people who have studied this say that you need to draw a line between what is medically necessary – in other words, trying to make sure people don’t have sickle cell disease or Huntington’s anemia. but it is a blurred line. if you try to improve someone’s memory to make sure they don’t have Alzheimer’s, you also improve your memory. ”

There is also a difference between editing a person’s genes, such as Victoria Gray, and making changes that will be passed on to their children.

In 2018, a Chinese doctor edited the embryos of three Chinese babies so that they and their offspring are resistant to HIV. Scientists around the world have condemned him for becoming dishonest.

“In China, at first, for about a day, he was celebrated as the first person to create designer babies,” Isaacson said. “But even the Chinese were constrained by what he did, and he was eventually tried and arrested at home.”

Since that event, Doudna has hosted a series of international conferences aimed at establishing ethical guidelines for the use of CRISPR, so that there are agreements before a disaster strikes.

“Eyelash editing is a fabulous technology that I think will ultimately help many, many people around the world,” she said. “And so, for me, it’s more of a management issue.”

In the last year, some of the most prominent CRISPR laboratories, including Doudna’s, have turned their attention to another scientific holy grail: Protecting us from COVID, starting with working on a cheap, fast COVID test at home.

Doudna said: “I imagine I have small CRISPR-based devices so people can come to work, spit in a tube and, in 30 minutes, get an answer, telling them whether or not to quarantine”.

Meanwhile, scientists around the world are exploring CRISPR’s amazing potential 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 biotechnology revolution will be 10 times More more important than the digital revolution because it allows us to hack the code of life, “he replied.” And we should not be afraid to use this technology to make ourselves healthier. “

READ A BOOK EXCERPT: “The Breaker Code” 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 through Amazon and Indiebound
• Walter Isaacson, Tulane University
• Doudna Laboratory, Berkeley, California.
• Institute of Innovative Genomics, Berkeley, California.
• CRISPR Therapeutics, Cambridge, Mass.
• Sarah Cannon, Nashville, Tenn.

Story by Mark Hudspeth. Editor: Steven Tyler.

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