AS I WRITE THIS, I am traveling home from New York’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where I attended the laboratory’s second annual conference on the gene-editing revolution brought about by CRISPR. The book of abstracts from the conference, containing the summaries of all the scientific research that was presented, is open on my laptop, along with notes from the many discussions I had with meeting participants. The attendees—some 415 in all—included not only researchers from academic and corporate labs, but also medical doctors, journalists, editors, investors, and people afflicted with genetic disorders. I’ve seen a similar mix of people at the many seminars I’ve presented at universities and foundations over the past few years. These groups are a cross-section of the stakeholders who will be affected by gene-editing technologies and who will help shape their future uses.
While I was at Cold Spring Harbor, a student—visibly pregnant—introduced herself to me and asked if I could summarize my personal journey as a scientist and mother living in the midst of the CRISPR revolution. Thinking about the metaphorical distance I had traveled, I had to laugh. And then I gave it a try.
It’s been a roller-coaster ride, one whose twists and turns I could not have imagined at the outset. I’ve experienced the pure joy of discovery; the “pleasure of finding things out,” as physicist Richard Feynman put it. I have marveled with my son about the ways that bacteria program proteins to work like armed guards that recognize and destroy invading viruses. I have relished being a student again, learning about topics like human development and the medical, social, political, and ethical issues that attend human reproduction. I have rediscovered what a special person I am married to, a partner who is wise, supportive, and deftly capable of everything from running a world-class research laboratory to helping our son with his latest rocket-building attempt to interpreting legal documents submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He also cooks a mean mushroom quesadilla and has excellent taste in Chianti.
Over the past four years (and, indeed, throughout my career), I have had the privilege and honor of working with some of the best and most brilliant scientists in the world. In my own lab, I was incredibly lucky to benefit from the hard work and dedication of countless students, postdocs, and staff scientists, folks like Blake Wiedenheft, Rachel Haurwitz, Martin Jinek, and my coauthor, Sam Sternberg, who were the ones actually running experiments on a day-to-day basis. Outside of my lab, I delighted in the opportunity to work with luminaries of the science world like Paul Berg and David Baltimore, who helped guide our quest to initiate a public conversation about the implications of gene editing, and fantastic collaborators like Jill Banfield and Emmanuelle Charpentier, who challenged me to pursue new avenues of research.
Of course, while collaborations grease the wheels of scientific research, competition is often the fire that stokes the engine. Healthy rivalries are a natural part of the scientific process, and they have fueled many of humankind’s greatest discoveries. But at times, I have been taken aback by just how intensely competitive the study and use of CRISPR can be and how much it transformed in a matter of years, becoming a global field that touches virtually any researcher studying biology.
These twin poles of science—competition and collaboration—have defined my career and shaped me as a person. Over the past half decade in particular, I have experienced the gamut of human relationships, from deep friendships to disturbing betrayals. These encounters taught me about myself and showed me that humans must choose whether they will control or be controlled by their own aspirations.
I have also come to appreciate the importance of stepping out of my comfort zone and discussing science with people beyond my circle of specialists. Scientists are viewed with increasing distrust by a public that is skeptical about their contributions to society—that is, skeptical about the power of science to describe and improve the world. When people refuse to acknowledge climate change, reject vaccination programs for children, or insist that genetically modified organisms are unfit for human consumption, it signals not only their ignorance about science, but also a breakdown in communication between scientists and the public. The same can be said of the protest movements against CRISPR that have already sprung up in France and Switzerland to decry the prospect of “GM babies.” Unless we can reach these people and others like them, such distrust will spread.
Scientists are partially responsible for this breakdown in communication. I had difficulty wrenching myself out of the lab to talk about the implications of CRISPR, and sometimes I wish I had done it sooner. I’ve come to feel strongly that we who practice science are obligated to participate actively in discussions about its uses. We live in a world where science is global, where materials and reagents are distributed by central suppliers, and where it is easier than ever to access published data. We need to make sure that knowledge flows just as freely between scientists and the public as it does among the researchers themselves.
Given how radical the implications of gene editing are for our species and our planet, opening the lines of communication between science and the public has never been more essential than it is now. Gone are the days when life was shaped exclusively by the plodding forces of evolution. We’re standing on the cusp of a new era, one in which we will have primary authority over life’s genetic makeup and all its vibrant and varied outputs. Indeed, we are already supplanting the deaf, dumb, and blind system that has shaped genetic material on our planet for eons and replacing it with a conscious, intentional system of human-directed evolution.
That we are unprepared for such colossal responsibility, I have no doubt. But we cannot avoid it. If controlling our own genetic destiny is a terrifying thought, then consider the consequences of having this power but not managing to control it. That would be truly terrifying—truly unthinkable.
We must break down the walls that have previously kept science and the public apart and that have encouraged distrust and ignorance to spread unchecked. If anything prevents human beings from rising to the current challenge, it will be these barriers.
My fervent hope is that I can motivate the next generation of scientists to engage much more deeply and openly with the public than my generation has typically done and that they will embrace an ethos of “discussion without dictation” when it comes to deciding how science and technology should be deployed. In this way, scientists can help rebuild the public’s trust in us.
There are signs of progress. In recent years, the open-access movement has made many scholarly articles freely available to the public, and the shift toward online courses increases the accessibility of education to students of all ages around the world. These trends are positive, but more needs to be done. Educational institutions need to rethink how students learn and how they can apply their knowledge to societal problems. I’m working to encourage my university, one of the leading public universities in the world, to organize cross-disciplinary meetings, courses, and research projects. By creating opportunities for scientists, writers, psychologists, historians, political scientists, ethicists, economists, and others to work together on real-world problems, we will enhance our collective abilities to explain our work and our disciplines to nonspecialists. I think this will in turn invite students to think more broadly about their fields of expertise and learn how to apply knowledge to problem solving. It’s always harder to implement ideas than to formulate them, but I sense a growing interest in such cross-disciplinary initiatives among my colleagues. And in a curious way, CRISPR technology may help spark these efforts due to the many fields that it touches on: science, ethics, economics, sociology, ecology, and evolution.
All scientists, regardless of discipline, need to be prepared to confront the broadest consequences of our work—but we need to communicate its more detailed aspects as well. I was reminded of this at a recent lunch I attended with some of Silicon Valley’s greatest technology gurus. One of them said, “Give me ten to twenty million dollars and a team of smart people, and we can solve virtually any engineering challenge.” This person obviously knew a thing or two about solving technological problems—a long string of successes attested to that—but ironically, such an approach would not have produced the CRISPR-based gene-editing technology, which was inspired by curiosity-driven research into natural phenomena. The technology we ended up creating did not take anywhere near ten to twenty million dollars to develop, but it did require a thorough understanding of the chemistry and biology of bacterial adaptive immunity, a topic that may seem wholly unrelated to gene editing. This is but one example of the importance of fundamental research—the pursuit of science for the sake of understanding our natural world—and its relevance to developing new technologies. Nature, after all, has had a lot more time than humans to conduct experiments!
If there’s one overarching point I hope you will take away from this book, it’s that humans need to keep exploring the world around us through open-ended scientific research. The wonders of penicillin would never have been discovered had Alexander Fleming not been conducting simple experiments with Staphylococci bacteria. Recombinant DNA research—the foundation for modern molecular biology—became possible only with the isolation of DNA-cutting and DNA-copying enzymes from gut- and heat-loving bacteria. Rapid DNA sequencing required experiments on the remarkable properties of bacteria from hot springs. And my colleagues and I would never have created a powerful gene-editing tool if we hadn’t tackled the much more fundamental question of how bacteria fight off viral infections.
The story of CRISPR is a reminder that breakthroughs can come from unexpected places and that it’s important to let a desire to understand nature dictate the path forward. But it’s also a reminder that scientists and laypeople alike bear a tremendous responsibility for the scientific process and its outputs. We must continue to support new findings in all areas of science, and we must wholeheartedly embrace and diligently exercise our stewardship over these discoveries. For, as history makes clear, just because we are not ready for scientific progress does not mean it won’t happen. Every time we unlock one of nature’s secrets, it signals the end of one experiment—and the beginning of many others.
—Jennifer Doudna, September 2016