The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, And The Future Of The Human Race Quotes
"Had she grown up in any other part of America, Jennifer Doudna might have felt like a regular kid."
"There’s an internal part of me they’ll never touch."
"The key to true curiosity is pausing to ponder the causes."
"I decided you just have to go for it, because what the hell."
"I always felt like I was the son that he wanted to have."
"I guess I noticed she was treated a bit condescendingly, but what mainly struck me was that a woman could be a great scientist."
"It made me realize that science can be very exciting, like being on a trail of a cool mystery."
"I didn’t get the sense that the teachers really expected very much of me."
"Nature, not nurture, made Rufus the way he was, and it also made different groups of people the way they were."
"The only way I could understand our son and help him live at a normal level was to decipher the genome."
"As I’m sure you can imagine, he aced them with flying colors."
"What makes a sky blue or a sunset pink or a leaf of sleeping grass curl?"
"I learned from Jack that there was more of a risk but also more of a reward if you ventured into a new area."
"One possibility is that we might be able to cure or treat people who have genetic defects."
"I was thinking how great it was that I would end up in Boston, back where I was in graduate school and had such a good time."
"Their choice of Berkeley is a testament to America’s investment in public higher education."
"It permitted researchers to use RNA interference to turn off a wide variety of genes, both to discover what each gene does and to regulate its activity for medical purposes."
"In the age of coronaviruses, there is another role that RNA interference may play."
"I reached out and tried to get in touch with the editors almost every week."
"When you do curiosity-driven research, you never know what it may someday lead to."
"Science can be the parent of invention."
"I’m always looking for what’s over the next peak."
"The beauty of Danisco’s historic collection was that there were bacteria strains from every year since the early 1980s."
"The conference rules were loose and trusting."
"You have to be rigorous and disciplined, but also know when to let yourself loose and blend in a creative approach."
"It’s important to know how to be an outsider."
"Charpentier’s little team discovered that the CRISPR-Cas9 system accomplished its viral-defense mission using only three components."
"I tried to laugh and to be very confusing on purpose."
"It seemed clear to me that the tracrRNA needed to continue to be associated with the crRNA."
"We have to figure out exactly how it works."
"Somehow, just the way she said that it would be fun to work with me made a chill run down my back."
"Once we figured out the components of the CRISPR-Cas9 assembly, we realized that we could program it on our own."
"Oh my God, this could be a powerful tool for gene editing."
"We isolated the Cas9-crRNA complex and demonstrated that in vitro it generates a double-strand break at specific sites in target DNA molecules."
"It was my first true biology experiment, with a control set and all."
"I was so excited that I began to shout, ‘It’s glowing!’"
"I got a request from someone in Jennifer’s lab to move their talk to before Virginijus. I rejected that."
"It was all very warm, despite the potential for awkwardness."
"She pushed me to make things, even on a computer, rather than play with things that other people had made."
"That meant human genetic coding could be programmable as well."
"I was excited to discover that animals could be a programmable system."
"It wasn’t just some gradual process where it slowly dawned on us."
"I don’t look at it as taking the torch from them."
"It was easy once you knew the components."
"Jennifer was probably convinced by the biochemical results that the RNA didn’t need that extra chunk."
"It’s sometimes hard to get a large molecule through the membrane surrounding a cell nucleus."
"Codons are the three-letter snippets of DNA that provide instructions for the specific arrangement of amino acids."
"The ability to carry out multiplex genome editing in mammalian cells enables powerful applications across basic science, biotechnology, and medicine."
"Scientific breakthroughs are rarely eureka moments. They are typically ensemble acts."
"We show here that Cas9 can be expressed and localized to the nucleus of human cells."
"Some great discoveries and inventions are singular advances. Others were accomplished by many groups at around the same time."
"CRISPR is turning out to be absolutely spectacular in George Church’s hands."
"If we publish this work, we’re going to look like amateurs in the genome editing field."
"We hadn’t been entirely happy with the first edition, so we rented a house in Carmel to have a two-day powwow on how to revise it."
"I am super-excited about your results today. There are signs that you are starting to make fetal hemoglobin, which is very exciting for us."
"The possibility of human germline engineering has long been a source of excitement and unease among the general public."
"Gene-editing technology had enormous power to do good, but the thought of using it to make alterations in humans that would be inherited by all future generations was unnerving."
"This research project will likely help you produce HIV-resistant infants."
"For billions of years, life progressed according to Darwin’s theory of evolution: random mutation in DNA, selection and reproduction."
"Once the genetic sequence is known, we can use CRISPR-Cas9 to insert, edit or delete the associated gene for a particular trait."
"The development of the device is a major technical breakthrough and will significantly improve cost-effectiveness, speed and quality of gene sequencing."
"I support gene editing for the treatment and prevention of disease, but not for enhancement or improving I.Q., which is not beneficial to society."
"If the technology was available to make healthier and better babies, would it be ethically wrong not to use it?"
"All tech can be used for good or for bad, but the early movers in new technologies have the opportunity to promote positive and ethical usage."
"A single case of failure may kill the entire field."
"Dream of being stronger? Or smarter? Do you dream of having a top student or star athlete? Or a child free of inheritable #diseases? Can human #GeneEditing eventually make this and more possible?"
"If I had the chance to choose the best DNA for my child, I would definitely want her to be smart."
"You want the best qualities to be put into your offspring."
"If this guy really did what he claims to have done, this is actually not very hard to do. That’s a sobering thought."
"Empathy is something that’s really important to humans."
"If I could edit the genes in a way that would reduce the probability that my child would be bipolar, if I could reduce that a little bit for my child, like, how could I not do that? Like, how can I want my child to just grow up and have to suffer like I have?"
"It was many hours going over line by line and discussing what the point of each sentence was."
"We’re trying to plan the world we’re going to leave for our children."
"Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
"If you use the m-word, it has a little more clout."
"They have different attitudes and regulatory standards, like they do on genetically modified foods, that reflect their different social values."
"To me, the big question is not will this ever be done again. I think the answer is yes. The question is when, and the question is how."
"This is not like nuclear weapons where you can have guards and padlocks to enforce a security regimen."
"If you call for a moratorium, you effectively take yourself out of the conversation."
"If we can protect a little girl or boy from certain disease, if we can help more loving couples start families, gene surgery is a wholesome development."
"You can probably have the embryo transferred to a human by a medical doctor in the U.S. if you don’t tell him or her what you’ve done, or you can do it in another country."
"What a mistake. Who at National Academy of Sciences’ media office is behind this bizarre tweet & page it links to that seems troublingly upbeat about human heritable gene editing & to trivialize idea of designer babies?"
"Our genetic conditions gave us a head start in accessing multiple opportunities for expression, creativity, resourcefulness, and relationships—for human flourishing."
"Maybe one day with CRISPR, they could go in and change the gene in the embryo so that the kid, when it’s born, doesn’t have sickle cell."
"In our day and age, decisions about genetic editing are likely to be driven, for better or worse, by consumer choice and the persuasive power of marketing."
"What’s wrong with genetic improvements? If we can do so safely, why shouldn’t we prevent abnormalities, diseases, and disabilities?"
"Couples should select embryos or fetuses which are most likely to have the best life."
"Diversity is good not only for society but for our species."
"Permitting parents to buy the best genes for their kids would represent a true quantum leap in inequality."
"To acknowledge the giftedness of life is to recognize that our talents and powers are not wholly our own doing."
"Our challenge is to figure out what the norms for gene editing should be."
"Evolution has been working toward optimizing the human genome for 3.85 billion years."
"We’ve never seen anything like this before. We now have the power to control our genetic future."
"Imagine what that will do to our species."
"We thought that Cas13 would cleave the RNA just the way that Cas9 cleaved DNA. But whenever we did a reaction with Cas13, the RNA got shredded in many different places." - Zhang
"This promiscuous chopping makes it possible to use Cas13 with fluorescent reporters to be a detection tool for a specified RNA sequence, such as that of a coronavirus." - Doudna's lab
"The game was afoot! They showed that SHERLOCK could detect specific strains of Zika and Dengue viruses." - Zhang and his colleagues at the Broad
"You know, nature’s got a ton of amazing secrets in it." - Jonathan Gootenberg
"We wanted the technologies to be affordable in the developing world." - Zhang on starting a diagnostics company
"The ability to quickly detect an attacking virus became critical." - On the use of CRISPR as a diagnostic tool