This year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry
has gone to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier
for their work on CRISPR.
And I am so excited, so beyond excited.
This, like other videos in my Science News series,
is part one of two.
This is a video talking about the news.
And then next week on Monday, October 12 at noon
Pacific time, I want to hold a livestream
answering your questions and talking with you
about this, not at you.
So let's all jump on the same page first.
I made a video about the ins and outs of CRISPR
a few years ago that you can watch here.
But CRISPR-- or the CRISPR-Cas system when we talk about it
today--
refers to a molecular tool that lets scientists edit DNA.
It's got two parts--
an enzyme that can cut DNA like molecular scissors
and an RNA guide that helps the enzyme
target the right place to cut.
And by cutting DNA, you can break genes
or insert new pieces of DNA and really
start to examine what each gene does
much faster and more efficiently than we ever could have before.
And this is important.
Gene editing is important, not because scientists
want to add horns to horses to make unicorns
or to make giant flying squirrels.
It's important because one of the best ways that we have
to learn what a gene does is to see
what happens when it's broken.
It's like looking at all of the parts under the hood of a car
and not knowing what they each do,
and then taking one out to see what happens.
If suddenly your car's windshield wipers
stop spraying out fluid, then maybe the piece you took out
is the windshield wash reservoir.
Now you have a better idea of what process it was involved in
and what it might do.
So we do the same thing with genes.
Break it, remove it, or turn it off and see what happens,
this can tell you what a gene does.
Gene editing is also important for medicine.
Some human diseases are caused by small changes in your DNA--
a single letter change here, or addition or subtraction
of a few bases, or sometimes something a bit more.
And these small changes can cause a gene
to be expressed at a lower level or cause a protein
to be misformed.
But what if we could go in and precisely change
your DNA so that gene is expressed at a normal level
again or that protein forms correctly?
CRISPR could have, and it does have,
huge implications for a number of diseases.
But I want to talk a bit about how we got here
and why this is so exciting to me.
CRISPR isn't just something that we built in the lab.
It started off as a bacterial immune system,
evolved to remember and fight invading viruses.
And aren't we all fighting viruses ourselves right now?
But scientists like Doudna and Charpentier
recognized that maybe this cool bacterial system
could be transformed into something that we could use.
Now, there were gene editing tools before CRISPR,
but they were expensive and hard to use
and just not that efficient.
But in 2012, Doudna and Charpentier--
along with some amazing grad students and postdocs
in their labs--
showed that they could take pieces of the CRISPR system
from bacteria, simplify them, refine them, and then use
them to cut a specific piece of DNA
that they decided on in a test tube.
And this was revolutionary.
By the time I was in my first year of grad school,
people were already using CRISPR to do new and amazing things.
And the field has just exploded since.
Groups showed that you could use CRISPR inside living cells.
They modified CRISPR to turn genes
on or off without actually editing the sequence.
New and improved versions of the system
have been made to cut both strands of DNA,
or just nick a single strand, or to put
new DNA into a spot of the genome that you specify,
or to more precisely change and substitute the DNA bases.
All kinds of things.
And we've used CRISPR to help select pieces of DNA
for sequencing or for imaging.
There's even a CRISPR-based test to detect
the virus that causes COVID-19.
All kinds of different applications.
I cannot understate how rapidly and amazingly this field has
expanded, and how much it has changed how we do biology.
Before, it was a long and laborious process
for scientists to change DNA in order to study it.
But now, it's so simple that I have
CRISPR plasmids in my freezer.
I just did a CRISPR experiment at home
a couple weeks ago as part of an upcoming lab with many PCR bio
who you know that I love.
The lab's not out for another couple months,
but it is so easy that you, too, can do it from home.
CRISPR has made gene editing possible
in so many different organisms, from bacteria to mice
to butterflies.
It has made genetic research so much more accessible
in a lot of organisms, where it was previously really
hard to do.
And CRISPR is being used in clinical trials
to try and treat disease.
Now, it won't work for all diseases,
but there are some that are caused by just one or two
small changes in your DNA.
And this is where CRISPR could be
used to go in and edit those changes back
to a normally functioning copy of the gene.
Because of this, there are currently
clinical trials using CRISPR to try and fight
certain types of cancers, some blood diseases, HIV,
and some forms of blindness.
This is truly amazing.
And beyond just the cool science,
I really looked up to Doudna and Charpentier as role models.
They were kicking butt in genetics at the same time
that I was getting my PhD and the field
was really accelerating.
And in a lot of ways, their feet were on the gas pedal.
Doudna gave a talk at Stanford while I
was there that had an associated lunch for students.
And she just seemed like such a down-to-earth and humble human.
And that was really important for me to see,
that you don't have to constantly
be cutthroat or showing off how smart you are to be a leading
scientist in your field.
You could also be a seemingly genuine and kind person.
And that was great.
This is also the first time that a pair of women
has won a Nobel Prize in the sciences
and it feels really good that those are my role models who
are doing that.
So what does this all mean for you?
Or for me?
Why do I care so much?
Why am I so excited?
So Nobel prizes in science are often not
awarded for a long time after the discovery is made.
This year's physiology or medicine prize
went to a discovery made in the '70s and '80s.
But this one happened in under a decade
from the publication of the paper
to the award of the prize.
And I think that's because it took so
little time for the impact of this discovery to become clear.
CRISPR has changed how we do science research
and it has the potential to change how we do medicine.
And these have huge impacts for all of us.
But, of course, as soon as it became
clear the CRISPR could edit DNA in human cells,
people started wondering if we could edit humans.
Editing human genes in consenting patients
is one thing.
The clinical trials using CRISPR now use it in cells that cannot
pass their DNA onto other generations.
So any change that is made in the patients
will not be passed on to their children.
But while there were guidelines laid out by organizations
in the scientific community a few years ago that strongly
recommended against CRISPR editing in cells--
called germline cells--
that could pass on their edits to future generations,
a scientist secretly conducted this kind of work anyway,
resulting in the birth of at least two children
who had been genetically modified as embryos.
There were a lot of scientific problems
with the work that he did, as well as
a number of ethical issues.
Way too many for this video today.
But I think it really emphasized to a number of people
in the scientific community that we couldn't think
of this as a future issue.
This is a now issue.
And it's not just the scientific community
that needs to be thinking about how we use tools like CRISPR,
because it doesn't just affect the scientific community.
It affects you and it affects me.
It affects policymakers and parents and caretakers
and farmers and everyone.
And so I think that everyone needs
to be included in the conversations
around how we use these things.
CRISPR is an amazing tool.
I love it so much.
I think it has amazing positive potential
and it has already done so much good.
But if you're not working with DNA every day,
I understand how it can sound kind of wild.
It can be really easy to watch a movie about CRISPR
creating giant crocodiles and gorillas
and wonder if that's possible.
It can be easy to hear someone talk about gene editing
a plant and wonder if that means it's still safe to eat.
It can sound scary that we're using it in humans, even
though the clinical trials are very safe
and really, really cool.
So I want to talk about it, because we all
need to be talking about it.
Because this is a super cool tool
that is near and dear to my heart.
And I just want everyone to know about it.
So let's talk together about it next Monday,
because I could go on for another hour here.
I've already gathered some questions
from Instagram and TikTok, but leave your questions
in the comments below or on Patreon if you're a patron.
Huge, huge thank you to my patrons
who let me take a day to suddenly make a video in a day
and post it and edit it and do all that.
I could not do it without you guys.
I'll prepare to answer as many of these questions as possible.
And I'll also answer questions in the chat on Monday as well.
Go forth, do science, and congratulations to two
of my science role models.
I know that I had absolutely no part in the discovery
of CRISPR, but this feels like a big win
for the whole community.
I'm so excited.
Like, truly excited.