Jennifer A. Doudna > Quotes

“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.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“just because we are not ready for scientific progress does not mean it won’t happen.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“The disjunction between scientific consensus and public opinion on the topic of GMOs is disturbing, to say the least.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“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.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution

“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.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution

“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.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

“This overall flow of genetic information—from DNA to RNA to protein—is known as the central dogma of molecular biology, and it is the language used to communicate and express life.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“Even gene variants implicated in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s may have benefits: E. S. Lander, “Brave New Genome,” New England Journal of Medicine 373 (2015): 5–8.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“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.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“Weighing the dangers inherent in a technology like CRISPR against the responsibility to use its power for the benefit of humanity and our planet will be a test like no other. Yet it’s one that we must pass.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“how a piece of RNA could pair up with its phage DNA counterpart and cause that DNA to be destroyed.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“human gene editing would almost assuredly never have the same catastrophic consequences as the detonation of a nuclear weapon”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

“CRISPR offers the greatest hope to treat monogenic genetic diseases—those caused by a single mutated gene.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution

“Scholars and journalists have already started dreaming that CRISPR might be used to create mythical creatures like winged dragons by editing the genes of Komodo dragons,70 noting in a prominent bioethics journal that, while basic physics would prevent them from breathing fire, “a very large reptile that looks at least somewhat like the European or Asian dragon (perhaps even with flappable if not flyable wings) could be someone’s target of opportunity.”71”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: The New Power to Control Evolution

“society cannot make decisions about technologies it doesn’t understand, and certainly not about those it knows nothing about.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“Armed with the complete CRISPR toolkit, scientists can now exert nearly complete control over both the composition of the genome and its output.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“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.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“Science does not know its debt to imagination. —Ralph Waldo Emerson”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“In this particular dream, a colleague approached me and asked if I would be willing to teach somebody how the gene-editing technology worked. I followed my colleague into a room to meet this person and was shocked to see Adolf Hitler, in the flesh, seated in front of me. He had a pig face (perhaps because I had spent so much time thinking about the humanized pig genome that was being rewritten with CRISPR around this time), and he was meticulously prepared for our meeting with pen and paper, ready to take notes. Fixing his eyes on me with keen interest, he said, “I want to understand the uses and implications of this amazing technology you’ve developed.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“We must break down the walls that have previously kept science and the public apart and that have encouraged distrust and ignorance to spread unchecked. If anything prevents human beings from rising to the current challenge, it will be these barriers.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“with a DNA molecule mimicking the genome of a phage.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“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.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

“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.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

“Even gene variants implicated in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s may have benefits, such as improved cognitive function and better episodic and working memory in young adults.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“CRISPR had morphed from a revolutionary but relatively esoteric technology into a household word.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“In 2015 alone, Addgene shipped some sixty thousand CRISPR-related plasmids to researchers in over eighty different countries.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“The potential utility of therapeutic gene editing goes far beyond simply reverting mutated genes back to their healthy states. Some scientists are employing CRISPR in human cells to block viral infections, just like this molecular defense system naturally evolved to do in bacteria. In fact, the first clinical trials to use gene editing are aimed at curing HIV/AIDS by editing a patient’s own immune cells so the virus can’t penetrate them. And in another landmark effort, the first human life was saved by gene editing in combination with another emerging breakthrough in medicine: cancer immunotherapy, in which the body’s own immune system is trained to hunt down and kill cancerous cells.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“only a remote possibility in the United States, since existing reproductive procedures such as IVF and PGD, which routinely cost tens of thousands of dollars, are seldom covered by health insurance. But in places like France, Israel, and Sweden, countries whose national health plans cover assisted reproduction, it’s possible that simple economics will incentivize governments to make gene editing available to patients who need it. After all, providing lifelong treatment to a single person with a genetic disease could be much more expensive than prophylactic intervention in the embryo using gene editing.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“that it was fantastically easy to target specific genes. All you had to do was select the desired twenty-letter DNA sequence to edit and then convert that sequence into a matching twenty-letter code of RNA. Once inside the cell, the RNA would couple with its DNA match using base pairing, and Cas9 would slice apart the DNA.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

“Few technologies are inherently good or bad; what matter is how we use them. And when it comes to CRISPR, the possibilities of this new technology - good or bad - are limited only by our imaginations.”
― Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution