Interview: Nobel chemistry laureate Jennifer Doudna on the promise and peril of the genetic editing revolution

Just weeks after I interviewed her this September, UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna and her colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic editing tool. An acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, CRISPR sequences were found in bacteria, where they protect against viruses by chopping them into pieces. Doudna and Charpentier devised a way to reprogram these genetic scissors, so they could be directed to cut any DNA molecule at a predetermined site.

The CRISPR/Cas9 editing tool has greatly reduced the amount of time needed to edit genes and is now in use by researchers around the world. “There is enormous power in this genetic tool, which affects us all. It has not only revolutionized basic science, but also resulted in innovative crops and will lead to ground-breaking new medical treatments,” Claes Gustafsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a press release accompanying the Nobel Prize announcement.

The positive potential of CRISPR editing tools is indeed breathtaking. “This tool has contributed to many important discoveries...