For UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, the revolutionary discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing began 15 years ago with a meeting at the campus’s Free Speech Movement Cafe. 

“This is a quintessential story about Berkeley,” begins Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry, in a lecture she gave on campus in April. “The research that I'll talk about today wouldn't have happened … if I had been working anywhere else. And that's because we have a really collaborative environment on our campus.”

At the cafe, Doudna listened while a Berkeley colleague described a possible adaptive immune system in bacteria that helps them fight off viral infection. Doudna's lab went on to research the molecules involved, discovering a pathway that allows bacteria to "learn" about viruses, store the information and use it for protection.

The scientists realized this same system could be used to trigger DNA repair in plant, animal and human cells, effectively allowing them to "rewrite the code of life." 

The seminal paper on CRISPR was published in 2012 by Doudna and her key collaborator, French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier. The pair went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Doudna discusses how CRISPR can be used to correct disease-causing genetic mutations, the impact that it's already having on people's lives and where she sees the technology going in the future.  

“We're in an era of programmable genome editing,” she says. “It's really exciting to see all the possible applications of this. We know that it can be safe and effective to treat and even to potentially cure human disease, and we need to continue to advance the technology so that it can be deployed more widely.”

Not only will that require continual activity on the science and technology front, she adds, but also in developing appropriate guidelines and regulations to ensure that CRISPR’s applications move forward responsibly. 

Doudna’s talk took place on April 4 as part of Brilliance of Berkeley, a course offered every spring by the College of Letters and Science that celebrates the campus’s exceptional faculty and their accomplishments. Each week, students listen to two guest lectures by top Berkeley scholars from an array of fields, followed by a Q&A. 

Watch the video on the Brilliance of Berkeley YouTube page.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts/berkeley-talks).

Music by HoliznaCC0.

Photo by Glenn Ramit/IGI.

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