My guest today Jennifer Doudna made a scientific discovery that just may be one of the most profoundly

important advances ever in human history. You've no doubt heard of CRISPR, the gene editing

technology for which Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It puts a power in the hands

of humans that we've never had before, and for better or for worse, the opportunity to play God.

If you're studying butterflies or you're studying rice or you're a clinician with patients

that have rare genetic diseases that you ultimately try to treat or cure, CRISPR is applicable

in all of those types of cases. Welcome to People I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

Jennifer Doudna is a scientific royalty. I don't think it's an exaggeration to argue that history

will put her side-by-side with Galileo, Newton, Einstein, names like that. CRISPR, that's an

abbreviation for clustered, regularly interspaced short-pelundrummet repeats. Allow us researchers to

pick any specific part of an organism's DNA and replace that segment with a different snippet of

DNA of the researchers choosing, and the applications of this technology are essentially limitless.

So you've published hundreds of academic papers, many incredibly important and well-sighted ones,

but there's this one paper of yours published in the Journal of Science in 2012 that was like a

nuclear explosion or a tsunami or a supernova. Did you foresee its impact, the attention it will get?

I certainly had a feeling it would be an important paper, but I have to laugh because every academic,

every time they publish a paper, they think, oh my god, this is such an important paper. That's

true. Stephen Doudna, my co-author, he calls that the lull before the lull because usually,

I think there's going to be a storm, but there is no storm. I absolutely suffer from these

delusions that people are going to care about what I do. But of course, I'm not writing papers that

are authoring the course of human progress. So let me ask you for a prediction. What probability

would you put on CRISPR materially extending your own life?

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