ON CRISPR: The Story of Jennifer Doudna with Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson - bestselling biographer behind Musk, Einstein and Steve Jobs - in conversation with Evan Ratliff brings you behind the scenes of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. The story of the third great technological revolution in modern times.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
With everything that's been happening in the world over the
past few years, you'd be forgiven for missing a few
headlines about a potentially monumental change to humanity's future.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
The Chinese researcher has created an international controversy over science
and ethics after claiming he helped make the world's first
genetically edited babies. This morning, the FDA appears ready to
green light the first treatment using gene editing.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Doctors announced this week they have treated a newborn baby
with the rare genetic disease using the world's first personalized
gene editing treatment. But how did we get here? The
answer lies in a single scientific breakthrough that happened back
in twenty twelve, when the world was first introduced to
a gene editing tool called Crisper.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
A revolutionary technology that can edit genetic mistakes.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
It's called Crisper. Crisper signified the arrival of a new
foundability to edit our genes as simply as we edit
a sentence with a word processor. Journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson,
who I've spoken to before about his books on Elon
Musk and Benjamin Franklin saw Crisper as more more than
just a singular invention. To him, it represented, as he's written,
the beginning of a third great revolution of modern times,

(01:07):
following on the revolutions in physics and information technology.

Speaker 2 (01:11):
I realized I had written about different technological and scientific revolutions,
meaning with Leonardo the first scientific revolution, and with Einstein
the physics revolution, and Steve Jobs the digital revolution. And
we were about to enter a life science revolution in
which molecules would be the new microchip. We would be

(01:33):
able to program them to do things.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
As with any revolution, things didn't happen neatly or quietly.
But there was one figure among many researchers who stood
at the center of it all. Jennifer Dowdner, the Nobel
Prize winning biochemist who co created Crisper. Her personal trajectory
and that of her collaborators and competitors, tells the story
of how we arrived at this new frontier of gene editing.

(01:56):
It's a story filled with global stakes and fiery competition.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
And everybody's at this conference. They're all trying to present,
and Jennifer and Emmanuel want priority. They want to be
the first to publish, They want to be the first
to get patents and this is how science advances, which
is a mix of cooperation and competition.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
And a story that touches upon the difficult ethical considerations
that gene editing brings.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Jennifer had a dream or a nightmare, and it was
that somebody wanted to meet with her about this new technology.
And she opens the door to the room. The person
looks up and it's Adolph Hitler, sort of in a
pig's head, and she's taken aback and she realizes, of

(02:47):
course that eugenics. I mean, this is what the Nazis
were trying to do to edit the human race. That
in the wrong hands this tool could just be not
just powerful, but evil.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
I'm your host, journalist Devin Ratliffe. But with the course
of five episodes, Walter Isaacson and I tell the story
of this new revolution in scientific discovery and the woman
who helped drive it. Listen to a Crisper the Story
of Jennifer DOWDNA with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.