Jennifer Doudna had recently arrived at Berkeley to accept a professorship in biochemistry when a colleague drew her attention to unusual bacteria found in an abandoned mine. The property of a single protein, Cas9, found in this microbe, led her to a revolutionary new technique of editing the genome. Known as CRISPR (for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”), the technique she demonstrated is many times faster and far more precise than all previously existing methods...
