Summary of Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg's A Crack in Creation

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg's A Crack in Creation in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: Not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about its use. Not, that is, until the spring of 2015, when biologist Jennifer Doudna called for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new gene-editing tool CRISPR - a revolutionary new technology that she helped create - to make heritable changes in human embryos. The cheapest, simplest, most effective way of manipulating DNA ever known, CRISPR may well give us the cure to HIV, genetic diseases, and some cancers and will help address the world's hunger crisis. Yet even the tiniest changes to DNA could have myriad unforeseeable consequences - to say nothing of the ethical and societal repercussions of intentionally mutating embryos to create "better" humans. Writing with fellow researcher Samuel Sternberg, Doudna shares the thrilling story of her discovery and passionately argues that enormous responsibility comes with the ability to rewrite the code of life. With CRISPR, she shows, we have effectively taken control of evolution. What will we do with this unfathomable power?

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638155232

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Insights from Chapters 1-2

#1

In 1983, biologist Jack Szostak discovered a repair mechanism for breaks in the double strand of DNA.

#2

The famous structure of DNA is the double helix, which consists of two strands. In the repair procedure, it is broken by enzymes before a corrected copy of DNA is inserted, which facilitates the healthy copy’s incorporation.

#3

By inducing a local double-strand break in the DNA, the genome can be corrected. When the break is introduced, the cell attempts to repair the damage, finding the synthetic gene ready at hand to replace the defective one that was broken.

#4

With this discovery, a new challenge arose. Scientists had to find the right enzyme that would break the genome at the right site, singling out the right DNA sequence out of billions of similar sequences.

#5

When the term CRISPR, for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, was coined by medical microbiologist Ruud Jansen and his colleagues in the Netherlands in 2002, an entirely new path for humanity was heralded.