CRISPR-Cas9 turned gene editing into a programmable tool: instead of needing a custom-built enzyme for each DNA target, researchers can now specify the DNA sequence they want to find and the system does the rest. The hosts credit the breakthrough to Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley working with Emmanuelle Charpentier in France, with the key discovery emerging in 2012 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry following in 2020.
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The hosts describe CRISPR as an enabling layer that shows up as a tool in many other scientific stories they cover, not just a standalone discovery.
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One host frames it as biology's shift from 'reading' the genome (sequencing) to 'writing' it (editing).
336 words · auto-generated from the episode video
2:04:11restriction enzyme that is programmable. Meaning I give you the DNA that you want to look for and it'll do the rest. Right? It'll find whatever DNA I want. Instead of having specific tools, now I've got a generalized tool. Um, this was Jennifer Da at UC Berkeley along with um, her partner Emanuel Sharpentier in France. We did a deep dive on this episode last year actually in preparation for our Nobel Prize because this is one of my favorite Nobel prizes. I remember being in college at the time when this was discovered in 2012 and immediately even at Princeton as a sophomore >> um, we all recognized >> this is >> that this we were like, "Okay, so when's the Nobel coming?" Yeah, 100%.
2:04:52>> And it came uh pretty pretty soon after. I think it was in 2019, so quite quite soon. No, 2020, Nobel Prize in Chemistry. >> And it just is an enabling layer for so many things we could tell. There's so many stories we talk about in our rundowns and stuff that just happen to use this as a tool in the toolbox for any number of different things. And it is really uh a huge we're starting to get into we we figured out how to read and now we're figuring out how to write. Yeah. >> Uh to our fundamental uh biological layers. 2015 first successful vertical landing of an orbital rocket. We will be a spacebearing species. >> Yes, this was SpaceX engineers. They achieved the first propulsive vertical
2:05:34landing of an orbital class Falcon 9 first stage booster at landing zone 1. I mean this is huge, right? It catalyzed the modern commercial space race, enabled high cadence deployment of massive low earth orbit satellite constellations. I mean, maybe astronomers don't like that because it's getting in the way of their telescopes, but at the same time, now we're getting remote access internet to places on Earth where that never had access to the