I always wanted to be a scientist ever since I can remember the exact field in which I was

obsessed changed week to week from paleontology to othonology to physics to entomology.

As college got closer, I settled on biochemistry.

It was around the time that I was graduating from undergrad

when gene editing found itself on my radar.

I became obsessed. So much so that I almost flunked in my last quarter because I was so focused on

learning everything I could about viral vectors, CRISPR,

recombinant animals and bacteria. But I made it through and now I'm in a PhD program

looking at the possibilities that lie in the CRISPR-KAS9 technology.

My lab takes rats that are genetically predisposed to all manner of genetic diseases and

we try to cure them via gene editing.

It's really quite simple when you get down to it, just like cutting and pasting.

You clip out the bad gene with CRISPR-KAS9, then either provide the body with the correct

gene or hope the body repairs that cut correctly.

I was working on a rat that had metastatic cancer, tumors roiled under the thing's fur,

great-grown masses that partially immobilized it.

Funny thing, cancer, it's immortal. It's just doing what cells usually do, but forever,

never-ending mitosis, splitting in two to create more of itself.

That was the gene I was targeting, a gene that had to do with the mitosis that was faulty

in the poor little rat. It's still hard to believe how stupid I was, how careless.

I went to inject the rat with my cocktail of castline protein and nucleotides.

It squirmed at the side of the needle.

...