Episode Details

Professor Doudna was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Professor Emmanuelle Charpentier for their pioneering work in CRISPR genome editing. The first genome editing therapy (Casgevy) was just FDA approved, only a decade after the CRISPR-Cas9 editing system discovery. But It’s just the beginning of a much bigger impact story for medicine and life science.

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Transcript with links to audio and relevant external links

Eric Topol (00:06):

This is Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I'm really excited today to have with me Professor Jennifer Doudna, who heads up the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) at UC Berkeley, along with other academic appointments, and as everybody knows, was the Nobel laureate for her extraordinary discovery efforts with CRISPR genome editing. So welcome, Jennifer.

Jennifer Doudna (00:31):

Hello, Eric. Great to be here.

Eric Topol (00:34):

Well, you know we hadn't met before, but I felt like I know you so well because this is one of my favorite books, The Code Breaker. And Walter Isaacson did such a wonderful job to tell your story. What did you think of the book?

My interview with Walter Isaacson on The Code Breaker, a book I highly recommend

Jennifer Doudna (00:48):

I thought Walter did a great job. He's a good storyteller, and as you know from probably from reading it or maybe talking to others about it, he wrote a page turner. He actually really dug into the science and all the different aspects of it that I think created a great tale.

Eric Topol (01:07):

Yeah, I recommended highly. It was my favorite book when it came out a couple years ago, and it is a page turner. In fact, I just want to read one, there's so many quotes out of it, but in the early part of the book, he says, “the invention of CRISPR and the plague of Covid will hasten our transition to the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions arose from the discovery beginning just over a century ago, of the three fundamental kernels of our existence, the atom, the bit, and the gene.” That kind of tells a big story just in one sentence, but I thought I’d start with the IGI, the institute that you have set up at Berkeley and what its overall goals are.

Jennifer Doudna (01:58):

Right. Well, let's just go back a few years maybe to the origins of this institute and m