Jennifer Doudna Is Pioneering the Science — and Ethics — of Gene Editing
Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna worked in an obscure area of biology — how bacteria fight viral infections — when she helped make a discovery that could change life on Earth: CRISPR, a gene-editing tool capable of changing the DNA of any living thing almost as simply as using a find-and-replace function in a word processor.
Genetic diseases from cancer to congenital blindness could be cured, but CRISPR’s possibilities go far beyond that, from bioengineering crops to resurrecting extinct species (scientists at Harvard are working on the woolly mammoth) to the moral slippery slope of designing “better” humans.
