In a new episode of Quanta's 'The Joy of Why,' the co discoverer of CRISPR Cas9 makes the case that gene editing's next phase will be defined by the decisions the public, and its regulators, are not yet ready to make.
Six years after the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Jennifer Doudna says the question she hears most often is no longer whether CRISPR will work. It is whether the rest of the world is ready for what it can already do.
In the first episode of a new season of "The Joy of Why," Quanta Magazine's podcast published this week, Doudna, a co-discoverer of CRISPR-Cas9, sits down with hosts Janna Levin and Steven Strogatz to talk through where gene editing is, and where she thinks it is going. The conversation, framed by its title as a forward-looking survey, is also a conversation about the present: a field whose tools have moved out of pure research and into decisions that have to be made now, not later.
CRISPR is, at root, a bacterial trick that has been running for more than a billion years. Microbes tuck fragments of viral DNA into their own genomes as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, then use those fragments, copied into a short guide RNA, to direct a Cas9 protein back to the matching sequence. Cas9 cuts. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier's work, recognized with the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, showed that the same machinery could be redirected to cut DNA that the researcher, not the bacterium, chose.
That redirection is the part that keeps getting bigger. According to the Quanta introduction, the editing capability of CRISPR has been tested on everything from disease treatments to drought-resistant crops to the resurrection of genes from extinct species. The possibilities have expanded so rapidly that researchers, ethicists, and regulators have found themselves struggling to keep up.
Doudna's stated worry, in the episode and in her wider public writing, is that the technology is moving faster than the rules built to govern it. Each new application, she argues, lands before the world has agreed on how, or whether, to use it. The Quanta introduction frames her as "a prominent voice not only for its vast potential but also for its responsible and ethical use," a posture that has become central to her public identity in the years since the Nobel.
This is the part of the Quanta conversation that does more work than its title suggests. A piece pitched as a look ahead turns out, in Doudna's hands, to be a piece about the present tense. The science has caught up to its own ambition. The conversation about when to use it has not.
The episode, recorded before the latest set of clinical and agricultural milestones that Doudna alludes to in passing, does not pretend to resolve the tension. It lays it out, in her voice and in the framing her hosts provide, as the defining question of the next phase of the work. What readers should watch is not just the next scientific paper, but the next jurisdiction to write, or refuse to write, the rules for how this is allowed to be used.