A Crack In Creation: A Nobel Prize Winner's Insight into the Future of Genetic Engineering

by Jennifer A. Doudna

an uncommon and usually catastrophic event called chromothripsis—a recently discovered phenomenon in which a chromosome suddenly shatters and is then repaired, leading to a massive rearrangement of the genes within it. The effects in the body are generally either trivial (if the damaged cell dies immediately) or dire (if the rearranged DNA inadvertently activates cancer-causing genes).

Interestingly, a genome’s size is not an accurate predictor of an organism’s complexity; the human genome is roughly the same length as a mouse or frog genome, about ten times smaller than the salamander genome, and more than one hundred times smaller than some plant genomes.

In the 1980s, Tom Cech, my postdoctoral adviser at the University of Colorado, Boulder, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of self-splicing ribozymes. His discovery was a breakthrough because the existence of self-splicing ribozymes suggested that life on earth arose from molecules of RNA that could both encode genetic information and replicate that information in primitive cells.