CRISPR, a revolutionary technology
that can edit genetic mistakes,
is getting attention and scrutiny this morning.
It's been called the scientific breakthrough of the year.
The CRISPR technology is like software for the genome.
We can program it, easily, using these little bits of RNA.
A few years ago, with my colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier,
I invented a new technology for editing genomes.
It's called CRISPR/Cas9.
The CRISPR technology allows scientists
to make changes to the DNA in cells
that could allow us to cure genetic disease.
RATHER: Thank you so much for doing this.
DOUDNA: It’s a real pleasure to meet you.
RATHER: Please have a seat.  DOUDNA: Thank you.
RATHER: You know, looking at my homework for this...
I’m just sort of stunned by how much there is to talk about.
But let’s start with something basic.
What is it that you do?
DOUDNA: I think I’m foremost a biochemist.
You know, I’m somebody who likes to understand
life at the level of molecules.
RATHER: When did you get interested in biology?
DOUDNA: I... you know, I grew up in a remote kind of part of the country.
I was in a small town in Hawaii
and I have always been fascinated by nature.
I think I loved the fact that there were
so many interesting organisms that had, you know,
arisen on this island environment.
And I think for me it really, you know,
it came down to thinking about...
also about the chemistry of those organisms.
I’d gotten... very early on, I had a wonderful chemistry teacher in high school
who taught us as kids that science is a...
you know, it’s about solving puzzles.
And I found that really captivating.
RATHER: When did you say to yourself,
"I dream of being a world class research biologist"?
DOUDNA: Well, you know, I went to college with an interest in chemistry,
and biochemistry in particular.
And, you know  I struggled.
I mean, my freshman year I was taking general chemistry
and absolutely struggling in that class,
struggling in a couple of ways.
Struggling to do well on exams.
But frankly also really struggling with the material,
struggling to understand,
why do I care about this? Do I care about this?
So I... you know, I got through that year
and then I remember in the fall of my sophomore year,
I was studying French language and loved it
and had a wonderful French professor,
and I went to her office at one point and I said, you know,
"I'm thinking about switching my major to French."
And she said, "Well, what’s your current major?"
And I said, "Chemistry."
And she said, "Oh, don’t change. Stick with Chemistry."
(laughs) I never forgot that.
You know, it was really one of those kind of precious moments.
RATHER: Alright. There’s a landmark moment.
This is at or near the end of your freshman year?
DOUDNA: Yeah. Yeah.
When I was having real doubts about, you know,
can I really do this and should I do it?
And, you know, I’ve wanted to do it for so long,
and now I’m not sure. And she said, "No, no, no.
You should stick with it.
This is a wonderful thing for you to be pursuing.
And you can study French on the side,
but you should, if you are interested in chemistry,
you should do it."
I think that was great. And so I did.
And then I would say another, kind of, for me, landmark moment
was in my junior year.
I was taking a biochemistry class at that point
and in the spring of that year my professor said,
"Umm... I have two openings in my research lab this summer
for students that would like to do research."
And shockingly to me, I was selected.
And so I went to the laboratory
and when I got to the lab my professor said, you know,
"I’ve been trying to get these bacteria to grow on big...
on these big sort of agar plates.
And we haven’t been able to get it to work.
And so, you know, I’m going to give you a chance to try it,
but it probably won’t work."
And I thought, "Oh gosh," you know,
giving a new student who doesn’t know anything something that we already know
maybe doesn’t work sounds risky.
But I, you know, I sat down, I did some reading and I figured out,
I sort of wrote down a protocol for how to try to do this.
And I did the experiment, and lo and behold I came in the next day
and I peeled back the foil on this big sort of
baking pan growing these bacteria,
and I had this beautiful circular, kind of,
culture of bacteria.
It was beautiful.
And I was just stunned... stunned, you know,
and my professor was too. (laughs)
I think she was just as shocked as I was that it worked.
And it just, it was this incredible boost of self-confidence, you know.
It was like, I guess I can do this and boy is it fun.
RATHER: Now, with this new breakthrough,
I want to talk about it.
It’s called CRISPR/Cas9. What is it?
DOUDNA: It is a technology that comes out of a basic science project,
which maybe we’ll discuss,
that allows scientists to make very precise changes
to the DNA of cells.
So, at the level of a single base pair
in the more than three billion base pairs of the human genome, for example.
RATHER: Is there some way you can describe it?
It might be better if we had a pad and sketched it out,
but describe it for me. What is the thing?
DOUDNA: Well it’s a protein, so it’s a very tiny molecule.
And it’s a protein that is programmable,
very much like you would program your...
your computer to do something.
This protein can be programmed
to find a particular sequence in the DNA of a cell
and make a very precise cut.
So, DNA is a double-helical molecule
and this protein sifts through all of the DNA in the cell,
many millions and billions of base pairs,
finds a particular set of letters in the DNA code,
grabs onto it,
and then uses a molecular blade in the protein to cut the DNA.
RATHER: Not unlike if you’re splicing film.
DOUDNA: Very similar.
I think this is the thing about science that I find so fascinating,
is that it’s a, you know,
it's a process and it’s a process of discovery.
I’ve always been interested in the fundamentals of biology.
Just understanding how cells operate in their environment.
And in the course of research that I...
my lab and collaborators were doing on a bacterial immune system,
we recognized that the way bacteria fight the flu
could be harnessed for a different purpose,
namely for changing the DNA sequences in cells.
And that’s not something that...
I don’t think I ever would have come to that without the path that we took
through the basic discovery of bacterial immunity.
RATHER: And why should we be excited about this?
We are excited about it but why should we be excited about it?
DOUDNA: You know, we’re in an exciting moment in biology, I would say.
I think this technology comes along
at a time when we have access to
a number of other technologies that allow scientists
to read the genetic code in cells.
I think what’s happened over the last few decades
is that there’s been a growing appreciation
of the nature of the code of life.
That really started in the... the early 1950s
when Francis Crick and James Watson
and other people, of course,
were involved in discovering the structure of DNA.
After that, there were then a series of technologies that came about.
Interestingly enough, many of them derived from behaviors of bacteria
that allowed scientists to manipulate DNA in very precise ways
and some of these include being able to cut DNA,
being able to copy DNA,
being able to clone DNA,
make organisms that would make many copies of...
of particular segments of DNA.
So these... these things happened in the 1970s and the 1980s
and really brought about what was called the, kind of,
the “molecular biology revolution”.
People may have read about the,
you know, the thousand dollar human genome.
So we went from human genome sequencing costing,
you know, millions and millions of dollars to costing now, today, about,
you know, just... just over a thousand dollars.
And so, you know, these technologies
all kind of laid the groundwork
for the kind of thing that we talk about
when we think about precision medicine.
There’s much discussion about this right now in our government
and around the world.
It's, "Could we really develop ways to understand ourselves
and our DNA well enough
that we could define and design
very effective personal therapeutics for each patient?"
Rather than taking a generic drug for something,
you’d have something that was actually targeted to you
and to your affliction, based on your DNA.
And I think to make that possible it...
it’s really going to require the ability to manipulate DNA,
to rewrite DNA.
And this is where the CRISPR technology comes in.
It provides scientists with a simple, fairly simple, way to...
to do this very accurately, very effectively,
in many different types of cells.
RATHER: And therefore much faster.
DOUDNA: And therefore much faster, much, much less expensively,
and in a way that allows many scientists to adapt this
for their own particular experimental research.
So, I think that’s the moment that we’re at,
is watching that opportunity for many scientists unfold
as they apply this to lots of different questions.
RATHER: There is a sense of history in this, is there not?
DOUDNA: It’s exciting. I mean, I think it’s, you know, I...
I think it’s fascinating to kind of look back at how...
how did we get to the point that we’re at now in science, you know,
and with this technology in particular?
And it’s a fascinating thing because it’s not a straight line, right,
you know, it’s kind of a meandering line, and I think that's...
that’s true for a lot of science, you know.
It's that we set out to do something
and it’s really through serendipity and observation
and kind of the unexpected nature of research
that we come across discoveries that lead us to the next step.
And so it’s not a... it’s not a linear path at all
and that’s certainly true with CRISPR.
RATHER: What’s new here is the ability
to cut out something that's bad, splice it back together.
That's what you're talking about.
DOUDNA: That's what we're talking about, yeah.
RATHER: Let’s go through the landmarks on your journey.
You’re teaching. Full-time faculty.
Doing your research.
How did this lead to the discovery of CRISPR?
DOUDNA: I was originally on the faculty at Yale and I was recruited to the University of California, Berkeley in 2002,
and when I made that move I decided that
I really wanted my research program to become more,
I guess, grounded in biology, you could say.
You know, I really wanted to start studying cells
and how they function.
And so I was interested initially
in that sort of line of thinking
about how to understand the way that...
that plant and animal cells use small bits of RNA
for protection against viruses.
RATHER: RNA stands for...?
DOUDNA: It stands for ribonucleic acid, a chemical cousin of DNA.
People think that maybe this was one of the
primordial molecules that led to the evolution of life.
And so we were studying this process which is called RNA interference
and trying to figure out the molecules involved
and how it works.
And then I, you know, I was sitting in my office one day at Berkeley
and my phone rang and it was Jillian Banfield,
a colleague of mine here at Berkeley who I didn't really know.
And she called me and she said, you know,
"We are working on bacteria and the viruses that infect bacteria,"
and she said,
"My lab doesn't do any... we don't do any experimental research.
We... all of the research we do is DNA sequencing.
And that work has led us to a very curious finding,
which is that lots of bacteria have a repetitive sequence in the genome,
in the DNA, that includes little bits of viral DNA."
"And I think this might be a bacterial immune system.
But there’s no evidence for it yet."
And she said, "I also think that this immune system
might be operating through an RNA intermediate,"
in other words that the genetic information stored from viruses
might be copied into RNA
and then somehow used to protect the genome from future infection.
So she said “I Googled who at Berkeley works on RNA.
And your name popped up.
So could we get together and I would love to show you my data?”
And that’s what happened. So we got together.
We met at the Free Speech Movement Cafe,
which is a historically important cafe here on our campus.
A cold blustery day here in Berkeley,
and, you know, Jillian was showing me her data
and I was just blown away.
It was fascinating and it seemed
incredibly interesting that bacteria might have
evolved a way to adapt to viruses
and then use little pieces of RNA
to find those viral sequences and destroy them.
And that’s what really got us started on CRISPR.
So it was my, you know, if you trace it back,
it was sort of my training in graduate school
that got me interested in the function of RNA molecules
that eventually led us to CRISPRs.
RATHER: And what about the walk in San Juan.
Where did that fit in?
DOUDNA: Yes. Well the walk in San Juan was later.
So, you know, so we started working on these CRISPR pathways,
and I had a wonderful post doc, Blake Wiedenheft,
who had come to the lab to work on this
and was joined by a student, Rachel Haurwitz.
It was really their work that led me to
be invited to a meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2011,
where I met Emmanuelle Charpentier.
And she was working on a different type of CRISPR system,
from a bacterial pathogen,
which means a bacterium that infects humans.
It causes the flesh eating disease, if you’ve heard of that.
And so her work had shown that this bacterium
has a different kind of CRISPR system
in which there was a single gene,
a single encoded protein
that seemed to be sufficient to protect the cells from viruses.
And we thought, on our walk one afternoon in lovely
old San Juan, Puerto Rico, on the cobblestone streets there,
we talked about this observation that people had made,
and we said it would be very interesting
to figure out the function of that gene.
And we decided to collaborate to figure that out.
And so that was what really got my lab
launched in the direction of studying this protein called
Cas9, which is part of the CRISPR pathway
but is unique in the sense that
it's a single protein that can be programmed
to find and cut different DNA sequences.
And it was really that work that led to the technology.
RATHER: Did you have a eureka moment?
Was there a moment when you said,
“Wow this is big. This is really big"?
DOUDNA: For me, I think it was really...
there were sort of a few of those moments in a way.
You know, it was really more of a process and, you know,
it was really through looking at the data that these...
these scientists in our lab were generating
that we recognized that this was
a very powerful way to recognize and cut DNA,
and it was that understanding,
that sort of fundamental knowledge of these molecules, frankly,
that, you know, sort of led us to the realization
that these molecules could be harnessed as a technology.
So, I sort of take some delight in that because I, you know,
I’ve always... I've always enjoyed,
you know, just doing fundamental research
and I love understanding the molecules of life
and how they operate in cells,
and here was a case of where that basic curiosity
led to a point in time when one could say,
here’s a system that nature has created
but we can actually harness it and adapt it as a technology.
RATHER: Well again, I want to move on
but before moving on I want to say...
any number of scientists I’ve talked to
have said something along these lines:
“We need basic research because
we do not know where great breakthroughs will...
where they'll come from.”
DOUDNA: Right.
RATHER: In many ways doesn’t the discovery of CRISPR
fit into that category?
DOUDNA: Oh absolutely. No, no doubt.
You know, I think, for myself and my collaborators on this project,
we were driven by our curiosity about a bacterial immune system.
We were not at all thinking about technologies or genome editing
when we started this work.
So, you know, I think it just is a real great example, actually,
of how discoveries come from all sorts of directions
that you can’t predict.
RATHER: To those who would say to you,
“Doctor, I admire that. That’s good...
but we need science directed at specific problems.
This business of knowledge for knowledge’s sake is...
that’s nice for a few academics,
but we need to turn more to this applied science.”
You say what?
DOUDNA: I say we need both.
And... and I say we need more opportunities to help people
that are doing either very applied research
or more fundamental research
to get together, talk to each other,
and recognize where they can collaborate.
RATHER: Let’s go back to the CRISPR breakthrough,
the scientific breakthrough that you made.
With CRISPR, has it been over-hyped?
DOUDNA: Certainly there are some media spins on it that I think are...
are probably over-hyped.
You know, some of the headlines about editing human babies, for example.
And, you know, and I think scientists are partly to blame for this, frankly.
I think, you know, not enough of us do come out of our laboratories
to talk about what it is we’re doing,
take the time to explain what we’re doing,
and try to... and it’s hard and, you know,
I’m certainly on a trajectory with this myself.
But to try to be able to articulate what it is
and why it is that we do what we do
and how it affects or benefits society.
RATHER: What do you think is the adequate response
to the hype about the promise of CRISPR?
DOUDNA: Well I think it’s... I think it’s to say, look, I...
this is clearly a powerful technology,
it’s clearly very exciting for... for many people,
and it clearly, I think, puts in front of us now
opportunities that we didn’t have even a few years ago,
you know, for curing disease,
for studying the basics of biology,
and for taking agriculture and...
and synthetic biology in new directions.
So that’s... that’s for sure.
I think that it’s important for people
to appreciate that in science, you know,
technology, even a... even a great, sort of, powerful technology,
takes time to turn into therapeutic applications.
They... they have to be... these a...
you know, these therapeutics have to be vetted.
They have to be safe,
they have to be effective.
And, you know, like it or not there’s just that... that..
that takes time, usually many years of time.
So I think that’s what we’ll see here.
I think what’s astounding to me, personally,
is just the speed at which this technology has been adopted
for, you know, a wide variety of applications.
And, you know, if you think about it,
you know, the work that I did with Emmanuelle Charpentier
describing this and presenting it as a technology
was published just under four years ago.
And, you know,
now we’re where we are today.
So I think, you know, this has really been
a moment in which, you know, a technology came along,
it’s a technology that came along at the right time.
It was an opportune moment when people
were ready to be able to rewrite DNA.
We had all of the other pieces in place;
we really needed just this tool.
And so when it arrived it was widely adopted very quickly
for all sorts of applications
and it's really pushing the pace of science forward in a...
in a really remarkable way.
RATHER: Give me one or two examples
of the application of this breakthrough science
that you, among others, have brought to us.
DOUDNA: There’s a well-known disorder called sickle cell anemia
that many people are afflicted with.
It causes a defect in the structure
of a protein inside of red blood cells
that causes the cells to sickle.
They literally change their shape
and they can’t fit through blood vessels very efficiently.
And there’s no... unfortunately, no way to... to really cu...
certainly no way to cure this disease right now.
It’s treated but not in ways that are very effective.
So what if you could actually
make a change to the DNA in the cells of patients
that have this affliction
that would actually correct that mutation
and cause the cells now to make
a normal form of hemoglobin in the blood.
I think it's a... it's sort of a moment
in which we can envision a change to the way
we do human therapeutics.
You know, we can think about
real cures for some diseases
rather than trying to treat them chronically.
I think this is now what's possible given this CRISPR technology.
RATHER: Now, are we talking about a cure
in some very distant future?
As, for example, frequently said,
we’re on the verge of finding a cure for cancer.
Or is this something that’s real and can be applied fairly soon?
DOUDNA: You know the field is moving very fast right now.
I think what’s interesting is to
look at the progress that many laboratories are already making
using this technology in animal models of disease.
So, if we can do this in animals, we can already see, a...
in principle, a path towards doing this in human patients.
I think we’ll see clinical trials within a couple of years.
Certainly for blood diseases, for example,
where it’s easier to deliver the editing molecules to the cells.
I think that one of the real bottlenecks in this field is delivery.
How do we deliver these editing molecules into cells or tissues
where they are needed?
RATHER: As anybody that reads the newspapers or watches television knows
there's a controversy about, you know, genetically altering food plants.
DOUNDA: Yeah, right.
RATHER: Now, is CRISPR in that category
or in a category by itself?
DOUDNA: Well there’s the, uhh...
there’s the scientific answer to that question
and then there’s the regulators answer to that question. (laughs)
Scientifically, I would say that, you know,
human beings have been altering plants genetically for,
you know, millennia,
basically for as long as we’ve been doing agriculture.
So, in that regard, you know,
having one more tool in the toolbox
to make genetic changes to plants I think is a,
you know, to me is a, you know,
it’s a great thing and it will allow scientists to do
fundamental research as well as frankly to help create food...
food from plants that would provide additional nutrition
or allow plants to survive in environments
where they would be otherwise be decimated.
From the regulatory perspective,
you know, here in the United States,
there was a recent ruling by US department of Agriculture, the USDA,
that plants that have been...
where their DNA has been altered
without introducing any foreign DNA into the cell by whatever method,
including CRISPR, would not be...
would not be considered genetically modified.
RATHER: You are modifying, but you're not adding or subtracting.
DOUDNA: Exactly, yeah.
RATHER: And therefore this argument over genetically modified food sources
enters a whole new phase with the discovery of CRISPR.
DOUDNA: Yeah, it does, yeah.
I think it pushes us all to really understand
what does it mean to genetically modify something
and by what criteria do we consider something
to be genetically altered?
RATHER: Well, this takes us to some of the ethical questions.
When you talk about splicing molecules,
when you talk about altering what’s inside of us,
it’s not far from that to dealing with the very
core creation of humanity.
DOUDNA: Yeah.
RATHER: Where do you see the red ethical lines and where...
where are we with that?
DOUDNA: For me, one of the applications of this
that I think raises concerns is the application
in human embryos or human sperm or eggs.
In other words, changes to DNA
that could be inherited by future generations.
That is, if you think about it, pretty profound;
it means really altering human evolution.
Society really needs to be educated about this
and thoughtful about whether and how to proceed
with that kind of application.
It could be that for certain kinds of terrible diseases,
the decision might be that for those kinds of things
we should apply it to remove a mutation from... you know,
permanently from the... the human race.
But where do we... where do we... how far do we go with that?
I don't know the answer, you know, but I have felt very strongly
over the last couple of years that
the pace at which the research was moving
was really vastly outstripping
the societal appreciation for the power of this technology.
I came to a moment more than a year ago now
when I realized that the science
was drastically outpacing the public’s understanding of it
and... and... you know, and this technology,
you know, being very powerful and opening many doors for researchers,
many scientists very excited about the opportunities,
and yet I would...
so I was interacting in that world during the day
and then I would come home in the evening
and go to my son’s PTA meetings and things like that,
and I’d be interacting with lots of very smart people
but who had no idea about this.
And I just... it seemed like an incredible disconnect.
And... and I felt uncomfortable being involved in this
and not getting out in front of the conversation.
So I’ve been very involved in
spurring a public conversation about this.
Trying to have chats like this to discuss this technology
in ways that people can hopefully understand,
so they can think about it and be aware of it,
and that our regulators can appreciate whether...
and evaluate, really,
whether we need to revise regulatory practices
to take into account the kinds of things that are now possible.
RATHER: The ethical waters get dark and deep here pretty quickly.
For example, you and those who work with you, make this breakthrough, CRISPR.
The information spreads worldwide.
If somebody says,
“Listen, what color eyes do you want on...
on your next child?”
Or, do you want your child to be tall?
Or what height do you want?
I mean, the potential is there to do that, isn’t there?
DOUDNA: Well I want to be very clear that... that
in many cases that kind of alteration to the human genome
is actually not possible now.
Not because we don’t have the technology to do it
but because we don’t know which genes to change.
Many traits in... in us as humans are multi-genic,
meaning there are multiple parts of the DNA
that contribute to those properties.
Even now in 2016 we under..
we don’t understand very much yet
about the way that genes function in cells and interact.
I think today we’re somewhat protected from what you just described
based on our own ignorance about our genome.
But that will change over time, you know, it will and...
and I think that having the technology that enables
that kind of precise modification of DNA
really does force us to grapple with these,
you know, challenging ethical questions
of when and how and...
and where and who should...
should apply this.
We can’t un-discover it of course.
We have to... we have to grapple with that knowledge now and... and...
and find ways to use it responsibly.
RATHER: What an important point it seems to me
that once something is discovered, it can’t be un-discovered.
DOUDNA: No.
RATHER: Well, I guess one question is,
it seems inevitable to me, a lay person,
that while you can’t do this at the moment
-- guarantee blue eyes if you want them
or a 6 foot 5 person if you want it --
you don’t doubt that that day is coming.
A question: If we could do this, should we?
DOUDNA: I think there may be uses of it to correct, you know,
mutations that would otherwise cause terrible disease.
And we're... you know, frankly,
we may get to a point where we say it would be unethical not to use it.
But for other purposes that are more
a preference of a choice of parents,
I find that... I... that's harder for me
to think that would be right.
Because I think that one of the things that’s so wonderful
about us as human beings
is how different we all are
and how we come into the world with our own points of view on things.
And, you know, having a child myself I’ve seen that,
you know, he’s got his...
he’s got his own personality and his own interests
and I don’t think it has anything to do with how I’m raising him.
It’s just... it’s who he is.
It’s probably in his DNA.
And, you know, I... I...
it’s a blessing and it’s wonderful
and I would not want to change it, so.
RATHER: Well, I do note, staying on...
what about the ethics,
that you played a big part in this meeting in Washington D.C. fairly recently
-- the National Academies of Science --
to discuss the limits on
this kind of, for some people, frightening future
that this kind of knowledge leads us to.
How did that come out?
I mean, for example I...
I’m thinking, when the atomic bomb was invented...
maybe not a very good connection
but there were questions then, but where does this lead?
Should... should we even invent this thing
because if we do who knows where it’s gonna lead?
DOUDNA: Yeah.
RATHER: Now, the world did come up with some,
what you call, regulatory processes,
but not everybody obeys them.
So, what... was this discussed at this Washington meeting
and how did you come out on that?
DOUDNA: So it was a great opportunity to, you know,
sort of start discussing what I think is a very complex
and fascinating topic
and a little bit scary.
And the end point of that meeting was really
the release of a... I would call it a consensus statement
arising from that discussion at that meeting
in which, you know,
I think we really made it clear that at least today,
that group does not feel it would be appropriate
to proceed to use the CRISPR
or any genome editing technology in the clinic,
meaning to create a modified person.
Partly because we don’t know enough yet about
how the technology operates in those kinds of cells
but also because we haven’t had time as a society
to grapple with this issue.
It's a... it’s a big one.
RATHER: Now I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask you about the dispute.
This is not unusual when someone makes... you...
you’ve made a breakthrough,
you give credit to others who helped with the breakthrough,
but there’s...
I think dispute is probably the best word.
Tell me what the dispute is,
where it stands,
and why anybody should care about it.
DOUDNA: Whenever there’s a new technology
that comes along and there’s opportunities to commercialize it
people would like to... would like to lay claim to it.
And that’s certainly true with CRISPR.
And the, you know, the big, sort of,
public dispute at the moment, that I think you’re referring to is the...
a the dispute over patent rights to the CRISPR technology.
RATHER: Exactly.
DOUNDA: That's being played out between the MIT Broad Institute organizations on one side
and the University of California on the other side.
Now one thing to appreciate is that...
all of us as academic scientists,
when we go to work at one of our organizations
we sign over the rights to anything we invent to our...
to our institutions.
So this patent dispute is really being played out
at the level of the institutions
rather than the individual scientists.
RATHER: Now, for the lay person,
there's a tendency to say,
"Okay, these academics see they have the chance to make money
and they're fighting over a patent."
But it goes a little deeper than that, doesn't it?
Even though you and your group,
Cal Berkeley and those associated with it,
put in for a patent on the regular track, if you will...
DOUDNA: That's correct, yeah.
RATHER: ... the others, the East coast contingent went fast track,
so they got a patent issued.
Your side, the West coast side,
stepped back and said, "Wait a minute.
We want a review of this. We want to appeal this."
While that appeal is being considered,
they've already issued this fast track patent
and companies are springing off of that
and making money off of it.
DOUDNA: They are.
Companies are not waiting to figure out
who ultimately will own the patents to this.
They are forging ahead with the research they want to do.
And I think more than a billion dollars have been invested, now, in...
in CRISPR startup companies.
I think this is commonly what happens in biotechnology, right?
It's that... you know, there’s...
this has been the case with other technologies as well
where there are disputes that take years to sort out,
but meanwhile the science forges ahead.
And I frankly, I think that’s...
that’s exciting.
I mean, as a scientist, you know, I want to see this used to help people,
to solve real problems,
and I would hate to see the science slowed down
by this dispute that's, you know, being...
occurring in the legal system.
RATHER: You know, I come from the world of television,
where jealously, envy, personal competition,
it's virtually...
DOUDNA: Never happens, right? (laughs)
RATHER: It's virtually unknown.
But this sounds to me like a new world of science.
How do you feel about becoming a celebrity, because, like it or not,
that's what you've become?
DOUDNA: It’s a little bit of a strange feeling to be... uhh...
in the public spotlight.
It's not something I ever anticipated in my career, I have to say.
RATHER: You know, a lot of the press points out that
you’re not only a world renowned scientist
but, lo and behold, you’re a woman,
which in a way is unfair because if you were a man they may not say that.
On the other hand, this is the way of the world.
You’re a... I wouldn’t say a rarity,
but it's somewhat unusual for a woman to have...
to reach these heights in the world of science.
Let’s talk about that, can we?
DOUDNA: Sad that you have to say that
but uhh... but.. but yes. (laughs)
Yeah, let’s talk about it.
It's something very important I think, you know, it’s...
is the whole issue of equity in science
and gender equity in particular.
How do we encourage more people
to get engaged in the scientific enterprise and...
and, you know, and girls in particular, you know,
making sure they don’t get turned off early on.
I think that is often what can happen
and then don’t pursue careers in this field
which could really benefit from their insights.
RATHER: Well, I know that here are many young women in the audience
who look up to you.
Anything you can say to them to encourage them,
perhaps even inspire them?
DOUDNA: I feel like a came from a very humble background, for one thing.
You know, my parents...
nobody in my family was a scientist.
I went to not particularly distinguished public schools
all the way through until I got to college.
And, you know, I just...
I really just really always pursued what I found interesting.
You know, I see now in my own students and my own...
you know, members of my own family just, you know,
fears about... about doing something.
You know, fears about making a career,
a particular career choice.
And I think I’ve seen this in myself, you know,
at times when I was feeling afraid to take the next step,
or try an experiment,
or join a laboratory to do something
because what if it doesn’t work,
or what if I look silly,
or, you know...
And I think one has to manage the...
you can’t really dismiss those fears necessarily
but I think managing them is important.
And I think maybe for girls in particular,
finding ways to give them support
at key points in their decision-making process
as they’re getting, you know,
early education and training
will be very helpful for encouraging them to, you know,
try things that are, you know,
non-traditional maybe for women.
RATHER: What do you think is the key to getting more young people
interested in the kind of
world-class mathematics and science that have been your life?
DOUDNA: I think it’s really important to show them that
science is not about memorizing facts.
I think that’s somehow... sometimes gets...
is miscommunicated in coursework that students are taking.
I think it's...
for me science is about discovery.
It’s really about figuring what we don’t know
and how do we answer those questions.
RATHER: Doctor I want to thank you very, very much.
You have been so patient with me
and very generous with your time.
DOUDNA: I really enjoyed it.
RATHER: I appreciated it greatly.
DOUDNA: It was a great conversation.
