How About a Break to Have a Covid and Science Conversation with Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna?

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A conversation with the U.C. Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna who shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier, now the director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, for their work on Crispr-Cas9, a method to edit DNA.

Who would want to miss this?  She explains how the technology works and more.

A More Humane World: Crispr

©2019 Laurel J. Delaney.  All rights reserved.

For all the anxiety and ambiguity surrounding Crispr – focused on developing transformative gene-based medicines for serious human diseases – there’s little doubt that it could revolutionize farming.

If and when the FDA decides to weigh in, says Hank Greely, a bioethicist and professor of law at Stanford, it will have to reckon with the unique risks of gene editing—that an edit might produce new allergens, for example, or spread from livestock to their wild cousins. His underlying fear, however, is “the democratizing nature of Crispr.” 

Learn more about Crispr and how gene editing aims to make our food supply kinder and more efficient. But it’s struggling to leave the barn.