The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

In March 2020, the University of California in Berkeley shut down its campus as the coronavirus pandemic spread across the globe. Jennifer Doudna—the Berkeley scientist who has played a pivotal role in inventing the gene-editing technology called CRISPR—rushed to an indoor convention center to pick up her only son, Andy, before he could participate in a robot-building competition along with hundreds of other high school seniors. Instinctively, Doudna knew the world was going to change forever. The next day, Friday, March 13, Doudna and a dozen colleagues gathered on the abandoned Berkeley campus to virtually brainstorm with 50 other scientists on the role they could play in combating the pandemic.

Doudna’s team immediately began work on creating a coronavirus testing lab and developing new coronavirus tests based on CRISPR. The team embarked on 10 such projects, but none of the projects focused on one of the long-term implications of CRISPR: Could the gene-editing technology be used to engineer inheritable genes in future generations that made them less vulnerable to viral attacks? Doudna dismissed the possibility to author Walter Isaacson in an interview. However, Isaacson believes that the possibility is more feasible than Doudna acknowledged at the time.

In November 2018 a Chinese scientist named