When US biochemist Jennifer Doudna discovered the key for editing DNA, she opened scientific frontiers full of promise – and peril.
Great discoveries – the ones that alter the course of human history – rarely happen with the sudden “Eureka!” moment you see in the movies: a lone inventor’s sudden flash of genius, giving birth to a fully formed breakthrough no one has ever thought of before. In the real world, giant leaps of technology – from the motor vehicle to the airplane, refrigeration to antibiotics, the computer to the mobile phone – happen far less dramatically.
The game-changing collaboration for Doudna occurred in 2011 at a microbiology conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when she met Professor Emmanuelle Charpentier, a French microbiologist based in Sweden. One of the minor sessions at the conference was about a little-discussed immune response called CRISPR or “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”.
A model of the groundbreaking technology developed by Professors Doudna and Charpentier, known by some as “genetic scissors”, whereby DNA can be cut and edited.In effect, Doudna and Charpentier had developed the master key for opening the DNA editing suite to practically all living things. Until Doudna and Charpentier’s gene-editing technology came along, the ability to make changes to human, animal or plant DNA – literally, the building blocks of life – sounded, if not exactly like science fiction, still a long way off, a little like artificial intelligence only a few years ago. CRISPR allows an organism’s DNA – from plants to animals to humans – to be edited, like blocks of text in a word-processing document or scenes in a film.
For cancers and heart disease, CRISPR could, in the near future, offer sufferers the possibility of prevention as well as cure. “I’m very excited about the potential for CRISPR to become a prophylactic kind of treatment,” she says. “In other words, helping people not only deal with existing disease but actually prevent future disease. So for example, there are already efforts to edit genes involved in hypercholesterolemia – high cholesterol.
Thomas met Doudna when she visited Victoria in 2018. “She is a superstar in the world of science, but she was very down-to-earth and so keen to share her knowledge,” he says. “I wasn’t surprised when she went on to win the Nobel Prize.”Doudna’s bloodline runs thick with impressive academic credentials. Her father taught literature at the University of Hawaii; her mother lectured on history at a community college.
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