My WaPo review of a new book on gene editing

I’ve reviewed the new book by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and The Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution; my piece is online at today’s Washington Post and will be on the first page of the “Outlook” section in the Sunday paper. The review is free to access, and is called “New gene-editing tool could cure disease. Or customize kids. Or aid bioterrorism.”

I won’t give excerpts here, as you should read it on the WaPo website, but I will say that the book is good and well worth reading; and I’ll add a few tidbits about the science.

The CRISPR-Cas9 system of gene editing, which hijacks bacterial immune-system genes as a tool to edit genes in other species, is immensely clever and has huge ramifications for biotechnology in many species, including ours. The most publicized use is, of course, to cure genetic diseases by replacing defective genes with normal ones in embryos or somatic tissue. It could, for instance, fix the mutant sickle-cell gene in those suffering from that horrible malady, or edit out the HIV virus lurking in the genomes of infected patients.

CRISPR/Cas9 also offers the possibility of customizing your child’s genome via “positive eugenics”, though I doubt that using the system to make your kids smarter or better looking is in the immediate offing. It’s also useful for changing the genes of crops (making them generate, for instance, their own insecticides) or domestic animals (it’s already been used to produce disease-resistant swine). And of course it’s the tool of choice to “resurrect” the wooly mammoth, but that’s not really happening the way we think. The plan for that involves replacing some Asian elephant genes with genes identified in the mammoth genome that are likely to produce longer hair and longer tusks. What we’ll really produce is an elephant that looks somewhat like a mammoth, but will be able to cross only with other such “hybrids” or with Asian elephants. We’re not even near the point where we can bring back extinct species with this technique.

Like the double-helix structure and the methods of DNA amplification and sequencing before it, there’s little doubt that the development of CRISPR/Cas9 as a gene-editing tool will garner a Nobel Prize. But who will get it? Several people could claim credit for the research, including Doudna, her French collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute, George Church at Harvard, and others. Each Nobel is limited to three recipients each, but you could get up to six if you award the prize for both Medicine & Physiology and Chemistry.

The Credit Wars are far more bitter with respect to the patents, as the Broad Institute is in court against the University of Californa at Berkeley (Doudna’s home), with both institutions claiming credit for developing CRISPR/Cas9. There are millions to be made from licensing the system out to biotech companies, though, as I say in my review, I consider it unethical for scientists and their universities to profit from taxpayer-funded research.

In the meantime, the Broad has won the preliminary patent rights, but Berkeley is appealing. And there’s an acrimonious fight between Eric Lander—head of the Broad, who wrote a self-serving article in Cell (“The heroes of CRISPR“) that basically gave his boy Zhang credit for it all and downplayed the contributions of Doudna and Charpentier—and Michael Eisen, a UC Berkeley colleague of Doudna who ripped Lander apart on his own website’s post, “The Villiain of CRISPR.” (To give Eisen credit, he’s not simply defending Doudna because they’re colleagues, for he feels, as do I, that neither Zhang nor Doudna nor their academic homes should get patents on the CRISPR system.)  Having read a ton on CRISPR/Cas9 for my review—I figure that with the work I put in reading the book twice and doing background research, my fee works out to about $5 per hour—I side with Eisen on this one. Feng made a big contribution in getting CRISPR to work in human cells, and for that probably deserves a share of the Prize, but so, I think, do Doudna and Charpentier. Lander simply rewrote history in favor of his Institute, which, like Berkeley, could profit immensely from patents.

If you’re a fan of biology and genetics, do read Doudna and Sternberg’s book, for we’re going to hear a lot more about CRISPR in the future. You’ll want to learn how it works and something about its history. (It began simply with some curious investigators, having no thoughts about gene editing, wondering why there was a strange bit of palindromic DNA in the genomes of some bacteria.) A Crack in Creation (good title!) is excellent on this, and very accessible. Where it falls down is in its discussion of the ethics of gene editing (see my review) and in largely ignoring the battle for credit and patents swirling about CRISPR. My criticisms of these two points are largely quibbles, but a full recounting of the CRISPR story would show that scientists are human, and sometimes eager for credit and wealth.