How Jennifer Doudna ’s Life Has Changed Since Discovering CRISPR 10 Years Ago

Jennifer Doudna was staring at a computer screen filled with a string of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs—the letters that make up human DNA—and witnessing a debilitating genetic disease being cured right before her eyes. Just a year earlier, in 2012, she and microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier had published a landmark paper describing CRISPR-Cas9, a molecular version of autocorrect for DNA, and she was seeing one the first demonstrations of CRISPR’s power to cure a human disease. She was in the lab of Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a Harvard researcher who was eager to show her the results from an experiment he had just finished using CRISPR to treat the blood cells from a patient with sickle cell anemia. What the analysis revealed was something that few scientists had seen before: after using CRISPR, the mutation responsible for causing the patient’s sickle cell anemia was no longer detectable. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] It was a thrilling validation of Doudna’s work as a co-discoverer of CRISPR, a technology that allows scientists to edit the DNA of any living thing with a precision that had never before been possible. In the case of sickle cell anemia, CRISPR spliced out a single aberrant letter from the 3 billion base pairs of DNA in a patient’s cells. With the mutated letter gone, the cells would, presumably, start forming healthy red blood cells that carry oxygen instead of the harmful versions that make the disease so painful for the 100...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized feature Genetics healthscienceclimate Source Type: news