The New AI Gene Editing Revolution

History, Breakthroughs, and the Future of Human Medicine

The New AI Based Gene Editing System was Born

In the summer of 2012, a paper appeared in the journal Science that would, within a few years, transform medicine, agriculture, and the basic life sciences more profoundly than any single publication since Watson and Crick's description of the double helix.

Its authors were Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, then at the University of Vienna. Their paper described a system -- CRISPR-Cas9 -- that could be programmed to find and cut virtually any sequence of DNA with a precision, simplicity, and affordability that made all previous gene editing tools look cumbersome by comparison.

Within a decade, Doudna and Charpentier would receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Within another decade, the technology they described would be approved as a medicine for human patients.

The implications were breathtaking to any scientist who understood what earlier gene editing approaches had required. Designing a zinc finger nuclease to cut at a new location required weeks or months of protein engineering and could cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Designing a new CRISPR guide RNA required synthesizing a strand of RNA roughly twenty nucleotides long -- a process that took days and cost a few hundred dollars at most. The technology was not just more precise and reliable than its predecessors; it was orders of magnitude more accessible. Virtually any molecular biology laboratory in the world could, within weeks of reading the 2022 paper, begin working with CRISPR.