Are you a Project Manager working or interested in personalized medicine and genomics? Want to learn more about CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors and the captivating background of Dr. Jennifer Doudna, one of its discoverers? Much has been written on this exciting topic including the recent best seller, The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson, “which traces the history of gene editing while simultaneously tracking Jennifer Doudna’s life.” In honor of International Women’s Day, March 8th, PMINJ member Anna Bayo read The Code Breaker and provides here a fascinating synopsis of the woman and discovery which will have a monumental impact upon the Life Sciences:
As a young girl, while bike riding in the mountains of Hilo on the big island of Hawaii, she wondered why a thorny vine called hilahila or “sleeping grass” curled up when touched. “What causes the leaves to close when you touch them?” she wondered. Her curiosity led her to ask “why” for the rest of her life.
Jennifer Doudna’s dad left a copy of The Double Helix on her bed in sixth grade. It is James Watson’s version of how he and Francis Crick discovered the building blocks of life, the structure of DNA, and raced to publish their discovery in an uber-competitive environment. Jennifer loved mysteries and the account sparked in her a life-long appetite for scientific investigation. She decided on her life’s path right there and then, even though some of her middle school teachers told her that girls don’t become scientists.
She eventually became a biochemist earning a medical degree from Harvard Medical School and later a Ph.D. in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology. She’s had professorships at Yale, Harvard and UC Berkeley. She almost changed courses while working on her undergraduate degree in Pomona College in Claremont, California to study French. Her professors, thankfully, convinced her to stay on her scientific path.
Fast forward to 2012, Dr.’s Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier published their discovery of the tool that edits DNA, known as, CAS-9, a CRISPR-associated enzyme, for which they were eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. For the last six months before publication in Science Aug 2012, they and their post-docs worked across geographies - Doudna at her Berkeley lab and Charpentier in Umeå, Sweden - to feverishly find the solution of the role of RNA in editing the DNA structure. Their labs worked 24/7 collaborating around the clock by sharing results of experiments (certainly an Agile approach!).
The impact of Doudna’s and Charpentier’s discoveries is that diseases such as Huntington’s Disease or Sickle-cell anemia can be eradicated from a human being using the CRISPR method of gene editing. The amazing discovery also raises moral issues of how the discovery could be mal-used if not strictly governed by globally approved ethical principles such as those in the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and World Health Organization Commission.
In nature, CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) is the mechanism bacteria uses to fight off viruses. The gene-editing tool that Doudna and her colleagues discovered:
“…is based on a virus-fighting trick used by bacteria, which have been battling viruses for more than a billion years. In their DNA, bacteria develop clustered repeated sequences, known as CRISPRs, that can remember and then destroy viruses that attack them. In other words, it’s an immune system that can adapt itself to fight each new wave of viruses—just what we humans need in an era that has been plagued, as if we were still in the Middle Ages, by repeated viral epidemics.”
The applications and impact of Doudna’s and Charpentier’s discoveries will become reality in the years to come. Doudna now works toward ensuring that her discoveries are used to improve humanity and to ensure that their benefits are accessible to all, and not only to those who can afford it.
I would be remiss if I did not mention here the work of the former scientist, Rosalind Franklin, who did not live to see Watson and Crick win their Nobel Prize, but whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA contributed to the discovery of its structure. Her contribution was not recognized during her lifetime but her discoveries made it possible for Watson and Crick to “visualize” the DNA structure.
