Clearin Vivid is sponsored by the Covley Foundation dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Alder and this is Clearin Vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

In bacteria, CRISPR is used to find and cut up virus DNA.

And once we understood that and how it worked, we realized that we could program it to find and cut sequences in human DNA that triggers a change to the DNA sequence at that place.

I think that what we'll see in the next, say, five years is going to be some really exciting science that shows us how gene editing can in fact have a profound impact on diseases that up until now have had no therapies, no real treatments much less a cure.

That's Jennifer Dowdman, a scientist who had a quiet but productive life studying how bacteria fend off viruses.

And then in a few short years, she rocketed to superstar status. She became a winner of the Covley Prize in nanoscience.

Her development of the CRISPR system along with fellow Covley laureates of Manuel Sharpen, Ye and Virginia Shichnes has revolutionized medical research and it's given researchers unprecedented power to alter genes.

We talked about what this means for developing new treatments for human diseases and we also talked about her experience becoming one of the world's most sought after scientists.

I'm so happy to be talking to you today partly because naturally, partly because of this amazing thing you co invented, but also because it came out of basic science, basic research that you were doing.

This is kind of esoteric thing that I find very interesting and you obviously found interesting, which was how bacteria fend off viruses.

We were doing that just with a joy of learning, right of understanding. Absolutely. Yeah. Joy of joy of finding things out as Richard Feynman said.

That's right. First of all, it's so interesting that bacteria evolved the ability to fend off a virus. These little guys had this sophisticated tool to do it.

How did you figure out that that would somehow be useful to humans?

Let's go back to where this all began. In the bacterial world, there is an ongoing warfare between viruses and their hosts, these bacterial cells that scientists have been studying for a long time because they're trying to figure out fundamentally how is it that that cells are able to protect themselves from getting taken over by a virus.

So in the case of CRISPR, which is really what we're talking about here, CRISPR is an immune system in bacteria.

And so I got involved in this research because of a colleague of mine at my university, University of California, Berkeley named Jillian Banfield, who studies bacteria in their natural environments.

And she had noticed that a lot of bacteria are able to acquire little pieces of DNA from viruses that infect them.

And so they keep essentially a genetic vaccination card in their genome, in their DNA. Is that crazy? It provides a record of past virus infections.

And so she noticed this and wondered why those virus DNA molecules were being stored and what they might be doing.

And she contacted me because my laboratory does work in biochemistry and we've had a long standing interest in understanding how cells control their genetic information.

And she wondered if we might partner to understand this, how this immune system operated.

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