Home > Author > Jennifer A. Doudna
1 " in 2011, Rachel and I founded a company called Caribou Biosciences to commercialize the Cas proteins. "
― Jennifer A. Doudna , A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
2 " Editas Medicine has an exclusive multimillion-dollar license with Juno Therapeutics to develop T cell therapies "
3 " PGD has also been used for other controversial purposes, such as the birth if so-called savior siblings, destined from the moment of implantation not only to live their own lives, but also to serve as organ or cell donors for a sibling. "
4 " we founded Editas Medicine with $43 million in financing from three venture capital firms. "
5 " As we began discussing authorship of a white paper summarizing our conclusions, we debated who our target audience should be and what kind of outcome we were hoping to achieve. "
6 " have no doubt, this technology will — someday, somewhere — be used to change the genome of our own species in ways that are heritable, forever altering the genetic composition of human kind. "
7 " It’s not that I was categorically opposed to the idea of scientists and physicians using gene editing to introduce heritable changes into the human genome. "
8 " improving on the natural course if evolution—which, attendees argued, could be so cruel as to justify some sort of intervention. "
9 " American spy agencies seemed rattled by the experiments too. I was shocked when the next Worldwide Threat Assessment — the annual report presented by the U.S. intelligence community to the Senate Armed Services Committee — described genome editing as one of the six weapons of mass destruction and proliferation that nation-states might try to develop, at great risk to America. "
10 " I'd recently co-founded an institute in the Bay Area called the Innovative Genomics Institute (ICI) with the goal of advancing gene-editing technologies. "
11 " human gene editing would almost assuredly never have the same catastrophic consequences as the detonation of a nuclear weapon "
12 " The power to control our species’ genetic future is awesome and terrifying. Deciding how to handle it may be the biggest challenge we have ever faced. "
13 " The disjunction between scientific consensus and public opinion on the topic of GMOs is disturbing, to say the least. "
14 " TOMATOES THAT CAN sit in the pantry slowly ripening for months without rotting. Plants that can better weather climate change. Mosquitoes that are unable to transmit malaria. Ultra-muscular dogs that make fearsome partners for police and soldiers. Cows that no longer grow horns. These organisms might sound far-fetched, but in fact, they already exist, thanks to gene editing. And they’re only the beginning. As I write this, the world around us is being revolutionized by CRISPR, whether we’re ready for it or not. "
15 " just because we are not ready for scientific progress does not mean it won’t happen. "
16 " Thus, the distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” has been obscured. Red grapefruits created by neutron radiation, seedless watermelons produced with the chemical compound colchicine, apple orchards in which every tree is a perfect genetic clone of its neighbors—none of these aspects of modern agriculture is natural. Yet most of us eat these foods without complaint. "
17 " Armed with the complete CRISPR toolkit, scientists can now exert nearly complete control over both the composition of the genome and its output. "
18 " A full 8 percent of the human genome—over 250 million letters of DNA—is a remnant of ancient retroviruses that infected ancestors of our species millennia ago. "
19 " Then, too, while gene editing is capable of repairing DNA in cultured human cells, it will be years before its efficacy is (or is not) demonstrated in human patients, and the few clinical successes that have been achieved so far with cancer immunotherapy and HIV might or might not be accurate predictors of other successes to come. "
20 " In 1923, d’Herelle helped Soviet scientists set up an institute in Tbilisi, present-day Georgia, dedicated to bacteriophage research; at its peak, the institute had over a thousand employees producing tons of phages a year for clinical use. Phage therapy has continued up to modern times in certain parts of the world—about 20 percent of bacterial infections are treated with phages in Georgia today—but after antibiotics were discovered and developed in the 1930s and 1940s, this treatment quickly lost momentum, especially in the West. "
