On June 28, 2012,ย a joint press releaseย went out from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announcing a new paper in Science from an international team of researchers based there. โProgrammable DNA Scissors Found for Bacterial Immune System,โ it declared, hinting that the discovery could lead to a new โediting tool for genomes.โ
That paper,ย โA Programmable Dual-RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity,โ has now been cited by more than 15,000 publications and downloaded nearly 65,000 times. It laid out the inner workings of a system calledย CRISPR/Cas9, transformative work for which two of its authors, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier,ย were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistryย just eight years later.
At the time, though, no reporters came calling, no news stories were published. Doudnaโs only quote was in that press release. โAlthough weโve not yet demonstrated genome editing,โ she said, โgiven the mechanism we describe, it is now a very real possibility.โ
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A decade later, we know what an understatement that turned out to be. CRISPR has been used to manipulate the genomes of organisms across every branch of the tree of life,ย including humans. Itโs now beingย tested to treatย dozens of inherited diseases, with companies planning to ask regulators for approval of the first CRISPR-based medicineย as soon as later this year.
