Back in 2015, longtime WIRED contributor Jennifer Kahn wrote a big story about a biochemist named Jennifer Doudna. (Alas, that feature was for The New York Times, not us.) At the time, Doudna and another researcher by the name of Emmanuelle Charpentier were at work on Crispr technology, and they had just made some serious strides with key discoveries about DNA manipulation and "Crispr-Cas9," or "genetic scissors." Five years later the two won a Nobel Prize for the work. (Before he wrote about Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson wrote a book about Doudna and her work.) But you probably know all this, because UC Berkeley–based Doudna has become something of a household name for any science nerd ever since. (And Jennifer Kahn went on to give a very popular TED talk about Crispr.) So when Doudna announced that she was involved in a big new project to try to use Crispr technology on the microbiome to tackle such problems as childhood disease and climate change (yes, both), we rushed to ask Kahn to talk to Doudna again. As Kahn writes, "Until recently, it would have seemed insane—not to mention literally impossible—to edit all the microbes belonging to a species within a vast ecosystem like our gut … My own gut feeling (right?) was that this was either brilliant or terrifying, or possibly both at once. Brilliant because it had the potential to head off or treat diseases in an incredibly targeted and noninvasive way. Terrifying because, well, you know … releasing a bunch of inert viruses equipped with gene-editing machinery into the vital ecosystem that is our gut microbiome—what could go wrong?" The conversation between the two turned into the latest in WIRED's series of Big Interviews. You can read it here. —Maria Streshinsky | Executive Editor |
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