The discovery in 1953 that DNA is a double helix set off a cascade of research into this molecule. As the bearer of heredity, it carries the instructions for making proteins while the various forms of RNA are involved in actual synthesis of proteins.
The realization that genes play a role in many diseases quite naturally inspired the desire to manipulate these genes in order to treat or prevent the diseases involved.
The big question, quite obviously, was: how?
Humble bacteria had already solved that problem eons ago because they, just like every other living being on the planet, are attacked by viruses. They evolved a defense system known as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Palindromic Repeats) which is, as the acronym indicates, a regular series of repeated bases in DNA. This repeated series was first discovered in 1986 by Yoshizumi Ishino, but he didn’t know what to make of it and left the matter there.
The first person to figure out the function of these repeated sequences was Francisco Mojica, who began working on the problem in 1990. This was sterling work, carried out with very little funding. It was he, too, who came up with the acronym.
In the meantime, the international yogurt and cheese industry faced a problem: their starter cultures, (mostly bacteria), were attacked by viruses. Rodolphe Barringou and Philippe Horvath, two French scientists who worked for the Danish food company Danisco, set to work on this.
They realized that the CRISPR sequences in bacteria resistant to viruses exactly matched the sequences in the viruses to which they were resistant. This was a huge breakthrough and the concept was quickly followed by other researchers outside the field of food science. One of them was the Lithuanian biochemist Virginijus Šikšnys, but his work was rejected by leading scientific journals.
Doudna was one of the scientists (which included a few shady characters) who took up CRISPR research, assembling a team of top scientists, all of whom made important contributions to her future discoveries.
Another major figure in this research was the peripatetic French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier, who much preferred working alone or in a smaller group.
The discovery of CRISPR and its associated enzymes is one of the most exciting finds in modern medicine and although much more work remains to be done, at least one successful application was announced recently, see link (2).
Doudna and Charpentier shared the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2020 for “for the development of a method for genome editing.”
The rules of this award stipulate that a prize in any field of science may not be awarded to more than three people at a time, and I am sure that more than just a few researchers must feel just a little hard done by, but that is an unfortunate feature of many discoveries: people who have made major breakthroughs are overlooked or forgotten.
The first part of this book is devoted to the scientific story. The exploits of the various protagonists are well described. No pre-existing scientific knowledge is required to understand the concepts.
The last section of the book deals with the inevitable moral questions raised by such discoveries, and there are many. Isaacson lays these problems out in a clear and thoughtful manner and that by itself makes the book worth reading.
I have only one quibble. On page 270 we read: “…RNA can be transcribed into DNA, thus modifying the central dogma of biology, which states that genetic information travels in only one direction, from DNA to RNA.”
This is incorrect. The “central dogma” (a term coined by Francis Crick, who soon regretted his choice of words) states that once information was transferred from nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) to protein it could not flow back to nucleic acids.
Isaacson is a biographer of note and his biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci are also well worth reading.
A brief video explaining CRISPR can be seen at
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKbrwPL3wXE
and an example of the potential for the application of CRISPR in genetic disease can be read at
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
