Want to Change Your DNA?
Biochemist Jennifer Doudna discusses cutting-edge DNA technology that enables the editing of the human genome. It also adds to a growing list of current ethical issues faced by researchers.
Growing up on the Big Island of Hawaii, Jennifer Doudnawas accustomed to the great curve of the horizon and the vast sky that envelops this tiny mid-ocean vantage point. It’s a vista that can be intimidating in scale yet inviting in possibility: you’re practically lost in space, yet everywhere is just there, over the edge, below the surface, at your feet. This is an apt picture for the discovery for which Doudna is best known. Inside the tiniest of bacteria cells she and her team discovered a gateway to a whole new world: within the chemistry whereby bacteria can remember and cut up DNA delivered by infectious viruses, she found a tool for editing genes.
Although DNA-cutting molecules (called restriction enzymes) had been known for decades, this was something new—an enzyme that could be programmed where to cut. Almost out of nowhere, this breakthrough has slung open a whole new window into genetic engineering at a level of precision and accuracy unattainable before.
Doudna and her research partners suggested in their 2012 paper in Science, “We propose an alternative methodology based on RNA-programmed Cas9 that could offer considerable potential for gene-targeting and genome-editing applications.”
Known as CRISPR-Cas9 (or simply “crisper”), it has indeed taken the genetic engineering world by storm.
