A Crack in Creation by Jennifer A. Doudna

Apart from her professorship at Berkeley, she is also president and chair of the board of the Innovative Genomics Institute, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes, and an adjunct professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). ĭoudna graduated from Pomona College in 1985 and earned a Ph.D. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, 'for the development of a method for genome editing.' She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Doudna was one of the first women to share a Nobel in the sciences. With CRISPR, she shows, we have effectively taken control of evolution.Jennifer Anne Doudna ForMemRS ( / ˈ d aʊ d n ə/ born February 19, 1964) is an American biochemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. Writing with fellow researcher Samuel Sternberg, Doudna shares the thrilling story of her discovery and passionately argues that enormous responsibility comes with the ability to rewrite the code of life. Yet even the tiniest changes to DNA could have myriad unforeseeable consequences - to say nothing of the ethical and societal repercussions of intentionally mutating embryos to create 'better' humans.

The cheapest, simplest, most effective way of manipulating DNA ever known, CRISPR may well give us the cure to HIV, genetic diseases, and some cancers and will help address the world's hunger crisis.

Not, that is, until the spring of 2015, when biologist Jennifer Doudna called for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new gene-editing tool CRISPR - a revolutionary new technology that she helped create - to make heritable changes in human embryos. Not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about its use. A trailblazing biologist grapples with her role in the biggest scientific discovery of our era: a cheap, easy way of rewriting genetic code, with nearly limitless promise and peril.

A Crack in Creation by Jennifer A. Doudna