Ricki Lewis

‘Tis the season for Science magazine to name their Breakthrough of the Year, a designation that typically irks me because it implies that science happens suddenly and we all know that of course it doesn’t.

FROM MAN TO MOLECULE TO BREAKTHROUGH
The Breakthrough of the Year began as the Molecule of the Year, which began in 1989 inspired by Time Magazine’s Man of the Year, before said magazine realized that half of us are female. Early Molecules of the Year included such celebrities as p53 and nitric oxide. Read More 

"Survival of the fittest" is one of the most misunderstood terms in biology. Evoking images of physical prowess, it actually refers to an individual inheriting traits that increase the chances of having fertile offspring, such as brilliant plumage or a high sperm count. But according to an intriguing study published recently in  Read More 

At the American Society of Human Genetics meeting in October, CRISPR-Cas9 inventors Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier accepted the Gruber Genetics Prize, then stopped by the press room. For me, this was a little like sitting down with Bono and Bruce Springsteen, but the women were wonderfully down-to-earth, and a little stunned at all the attention since they published their key paper in 2012 on the technique that is speeding gene editing and making genome editing a reality.

This week an International Summit on Human Gene Editing held in Washington DC discussed the potential promises and pitfalls of gene editing technology. A terrific review is here. For those of us who were around at the debut of modern biotechnology in the 1970s, it’s déjà vu all over again. I hope the outcome will be the same. Although concern over recombinant DNA technology back then began with alarm, it basically ended with not triple-headed purple monsters, as my then-grad-school advisor dubbed the concern, but with a new and more targeted source of drugs, beginning with human insulin.

Below are selected comments from Drs. Doudna (a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley) and Charpentier (director of the new Max Planck Institute of Infection Biology in Berlin) from their talks and visit to the press room in October. I’ll cover here what I didn’t a few weeks ago here and in Medscape to accompany the conference. Read More