Jennifer Doudna, The Gene Tuner: Revamping The Genes for a Better Race (ePub)

Can humans edit genes and engineer the future generation? Can we alter the height, weight, muscles, and other aspects of our future generation? If yes, then will it have repercussions? Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist, and the winner of the Nobel Prize may have answers to these puzzling questions. For the first time, Nobel Prize was given to two women. But that is not the only special thing about Jennifer Doudna's CRISPR technology (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). CRISPR technology is not a new generation one. It has been around for centuries now, in the form of a defense mechanism in bacteria to fend off viruses. But Jennifer Doudna's researches have led to a path-breaking revelation that this technology could also be used to edit genes. If it is successful, then it could mend all diseases that are originated due to gene mutations. Presently, it is estimated that around 7000 diseases including sickle-cell disease and Hartington's disease can be cured using the CRISPR technology that Jennifer Doudna pioneered. Scientific rivalries are not uncommon. If in the 1950s, it was James Watson-Francis Crick team versus Rosalind Franklin, Craig Venter-Celera versus Francis Collis-Human Genome Project in the 1990s, in 2020, it is Jennifer Doudna versus Feng Zhang. This spat between two talented and remarkably intelligent researchers could be a multi-billion dollar feud, and all in the name of a CRISPR technology. There are one technology and several takers, not to mention the patent battle.