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This week Harry is joined by Kevin Davies, author of the 2020 book Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing. CRISPR—an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats—consists of DNA sequences that evolved to help bacteria recognize and defend against viral invaders, as a kind of primitive immune system. Thanks to its ability to precisely detect and cut other DNA sequences, CRISPR has spread to labs across the world in the nine years since Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier published a groundbreaking 2012 Science paper describing how the process works. 

The Nobel Prize committee recognized the two scientists for the achievement in 2020, one day after Davies' book came out. The book explains how CRISPR was discovered, how it was turned into an easily programmable tool for cutting and pasting stretches of DNA, how most of the early pioneers in the field have now formed competing biotech companies, and how the technology is being used to help patients today—and in at least one famous case, misused. Today's interview covers all of that ground and more.

Davies is a PhD geneticist who has spent most of his career in life sciences publishing. After his postdoc with Harvey Lodish at the Whitehead Institute, Davies worked as an assistant editor at Nature, the founding editor of Nature Genetics (Nature’s first spinoff journal), editor-in-chief at Cell Press, founding editor-in-chief of the Boston-based publication Bio-IT World, and publisher of Chemical & Engineering News. In 2018 he helped to launch The CRISPR Journal, where he is the executive editor. Davies’ previous books include Breakthrough (1995) about the race to understand the BRCA1 breast cancer gene, Cracking the Genome (2001) about the Human Genome Project, The $1,000 Genome (2010) about next-generation sequencing companies, and DNA (2017), an updated version of James Watson’s 2004 book, co-authored with Watson and Andrew Berry.

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Full Transcript

Harry Glorikian: I’m Harry Glorikian, and this is MoneyBall Medicine, the interview podcast where we meet researchers, entrepreneurs, and physicians who are using the power of data to improve patient health and make healthcare delivery more efficient. You can think of each episode as a new chapter in the never-ending audio version of my 2017 book, “MoneyBall Medicine: Thriving in the New Data-Driven Healthcare Market.” If you like the show, please do us a favor and leave a rating and review at Apple Podcasts.