I remember standing in my kitchen, cooking dinner for my son, and I just, I suddenly just burst out laughing, you know.

It was just this, suddenly this joyful thought of, isn't it crazy that nature has come up with this incredible little machine?

The history of science is full of accidental discoveries.

Penicillin, perhaps most famously, but also gunpowder and nuclear fission.

It makes sense, doesn't it?

Because you don't know what you don't know, you don't always know what you're looking for, or at.

Sometimes you've just got a curious mind.

So the research project that led to this technology was really a, you know, it was a curiosity-driven project.

Jennifer Doudna is a professor of chemistry and biology at the University of California Berkeley.

And I've had a long time interest in understanding fundamental biology, in particular aspects of a genetic control,

and the way that evolution has come up with creative ways to regulate the expression of information in cells.

When you first heard, literally heard the phrase CRISPR, just describe that moment, what your understanding of it was,

and what you kind of initially envisioned it facilitating.

Well, when I first heard the acronym CRISPR, this was from a conversation with Jill Banfield.

I had no idea what that was.

This was in 2006.

Banfield, also a Berkeley scientist,

had been studying bacteria that grow in toxic environments.

And so she was looking at bugs that grow in old mine shafts, and, you know, these pools of water that build up in old mines

that are often very acidic, or they have various kinds of metallic contaminants to figure out what bugs are growing there,

and how are they surviving?

The key to their survival was called CRISPR,

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