This is an IHeart podcast.

When news broke earlier this year that baby KJ, a newborn in Philadelphia,

had successfully received the world's first personalized gene editing treatment,

it represented a milestone for both researchers and patients.

But there's a gripping tale of discovery behind this accomplishment and its creators.

I'm Evan Ratliff, and together with biographer Walter Isaacson,

we're delving into the story of Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Dowdna,

the woman who's helped change the trajectory of humanity.

Listen to Aunt CRISPR, the story of Jennifer Dowdna with Walter Isaacson

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Music or wherever you get your podcast. It's a vast, cold, mostly empty universe.

And as lucky as we've been to live in a time when we are discovering planets around

other stars, we still have no evidence that there is anyone out there living on any of them.

The prospect that we are the only life in the universe or the only intelligent life still haunts us.

Of course, people say the aliens could be out there, even if we haven't found them.

So let's flip the script and think about it from the aliens' point of view.

Why haven't they found us?

Could they find us?

There are lots of planets in the galaxy, after all, and we're only on one of them.

Today on the podcast, we're going to explore the prospects for a technology that promises to unleash vast exploratory power, one that might

allow us to visit any planet in the galaxy and to look for aliens in a reasonable amount of

time, or to allow aliens to have come and visited our planet. That technology is self-replicating

...