In his meager spare time, Zhang personally set about adapting his SHERLOCK diagnostic method to develop a relatively simple diagnostic test for COVID-19. The test received emergency FDA approval—the first for a CRISPR diagnostic—in May 2020.13 There’s even an at-home version called STOPCovid,I designed to work in about an hour for less than $10 (not counting the outlay for a sous vide to substitute for a lab water bath).14 And he formed a team with the CEO of Pinterest, Ben Silbermann, that took just three weeks to develop and release an app called How We Feel for people to track their personal health and symptoms in real time.15 Zhang and Silbermann have been friends since they met in high school in Des Moines, Iowa, a lifetime ago.
Other gene editing luminaries also retooled to tackle the COVID-19 crisis. In March 2020, a venture capitalist in Boston named Tom Cahill, who had launched a $125 million fund backed by a small group of billionaires including Peter Thiel and Stephen Pagliuca, co-owner of the Boston Celtics, organized a conference call to discuss COVID-19. Word spread fast. Cahill knew something was amiss when he couldn’t dial in because the call was over-subscribed with hundreds of listeners. “There was a sense of desperation among these masters of the universe” about the threat posed by the virus to their families and businesses, said Rob Copeland, who broke the story.16
Cahill decided to convene a 21st century Manhattan Project, the Justice League of scientists to vanquish the virus. Team captain was Stuart Schreiber, a distinguished chemist at Harvard, who created the Scientists to Stop COVID-19. The dozen experts included his colleague David Liu and a Nobel laureate, Michael Rosbash, who said he was the least qualified person on the team. Their report on the best prospects to defeat the virus from a pool of two hundred candidates17 was sent via some well-placed connections to the White House. Schreiber even attached superhero names to his group, including Batman (Ben Cravatt) and Wonder Woman (Akiko Iwasaki). Iron Man is part of a different superhero universe, so Liu is Cyborg—half man, half machine, genius intellect.
Alas, humans don’t have their own version of CRISPR superpower to cut down the coronavirus—but perhaps one day they could receive it. At Stanford, Stanley Qi leads an effort to deploy CRISPR-Cas13 in a method called PAC-MAN, designing CRISPR guide RNAs to seek out and destroy coronavirus RNA sequences.18 After all, why wouldn’t the most popular, versatile tool in the biotechnology arsenal be used to vanquish the virus?
The irony of this emergency call to arms was not lost on Doudna, Zhang, or any of their colleagues. CRISPR evolved to vanquish a particular group of viruses, the bacteriophages. Now a particularly malevolent virus was spreading around the world by feasting on the airways of a different host. “Bacteria have been dealing with viruses forever,” Doudna observed. “They’ve had to come up with creative ways to fight them. And now here we are, humans, in a pandemic facing this challenge.”19
As we contemplate the future of genome editing, I can’t help but think of the remarkable progress geneticists have made over the past fifty to seventy-five years, unraveling the secrets of the gene and the genome like the Cas enzyme unzipping the double helix. Francis Crick and Jim Watson’s classic 1953 letter to Nature consisted of eight hundred words and one diagram—a beautiful, elegant pencil drawing of the double helix courtesy of Crick’s wife Odile. CRISPR has given us the means to modify the DNA code as easily (almost) as a deft flick of Odile’s pencil eraser.
Odile Crick was a professional painter with a penchant for nudes. She wasn’t as enamored with the double helix breakthrough as her husband. “You were always coming home and saying things like that, so naturally I thought nothing of it,” she recalled. Nevertheless, her double helix became not only the most famous scientific drawing of the 20th century but also the universal symbol of humankind’s quest to understand, repair, manipulate, and control the code of life—to read, write, and edit DNA.
Odile only drew one other scientific illustration in her life.20 Her granddaughter Kindra, an accomplished artist in her own right, told me where to look. It appeared in a book by neuroscientist Christof Koch called The Quest for Consciousness.21 The simple drawing was of a woman with shoulder-length hair in a short dark dress running, a static picture depicting motion. To where exactly is left to our imagination.
CRISPR is moving faster than society can keep up. To where is up to all of us.
I. “STOP” stands for SHERLOCK Testing in One Pot.
Caught in the act: Cas9 severs a strand of DNA, captured by Japanese researchers using high-speed atomic force microscopy. Courtesy of Hiroshi Nishimasu.
The Cas9 caress: Schematic shows the Cas9 protein (teal) holding the guide RNA (blue) scans for its target DNA (red) by first recognizing a PAM site (yellow). Courtesy of HHMI BioInteractive.
Francisco Mojica and the author at the salterns of Santa Pola, Spain, in 2019.
Microbiologist Luciano Marraffini, who collaborated with Feng Zhang in 2012, in his lab at The Rockefeller University, New York (September 2019).
Jill Banfield, UC Berkeley professor who, among other things, introduced her colleague Jennifer Doudna to CRISPR. Courtesy of Derek Reich/Human Nature.
Plant biologist Caixia Gao in a field of CRISPR-edited wheat (to reduce susceptibility to powdery mildew) in Beijing, China. Courtesy of Stefen Chow.
Fyodor Urnov, the expert raconteur of genome editing, now at the Innovative Genomics Institute. Courtesy of Derek Reich/Human Nature.
Dana Carroll, biochemist who pioneered use of zinc finger nucleases.
Larger than life: George Church next to an ex-woolly mammoth in a hotel lobby in Yakutsk, the coldest city on earth in Eastern Siberia. Courtesy of Eriona Hysolli.
Church in his office at Harvard Medical School.
Jennifer Doudna (UC Berkeley and HHMI), cradling a model of Cas9, the molecular scissors of genome editing, opens the World Science Festival in New York in May 2019.
Emmanuelle Charpentier, founding director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, on a flying visit to New York (September 2018).
DC united: Doudna-Charpentier team photo on the steps of Stanley Hall, UC Berkeley, in 2011. (L-to-R): Charpentier, Doudna, Martin Jínek, Krystof Chyliński, and Ines Fonfara. Courtesy of M. Jínek.
Lithuania’s Virginijus Šikšnys receives the 2018 Kavli Prize in nanoscience from King Harald of Norway, alongside Doudna and Charpentier (September 2018). Courtesy of Fredrik Hagen/NTB scanpix.
Feng Zhang holds CRISPR in his hands, with 60 Minutes’ correspondent Bill Whitaker. Courtesy of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.