A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution Hardcover – June 13, 2017

In A crack in creation, Gene editing and the unthinkable power to control evolution, written by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg, Dr. Doudna goes over the history of gene editing leading to the miraculous CRISPR which literally has the power to change every living thing in the world. Throughout the book Dr. Doudna describes the wonderful possibilities CRISPR has to offer the world of medicine and biology from curing diseases such as hyperargininemia or to creating super foods that grow bigger and faster that are also immune to all forms of infection without adding anything to the DNA. According to Doudna the possibilities are endless, but with all the good there is also a bad side. Humans now have the power to easily edit germline DNA in plants, animals, and humans that if implemented will forever change the course of that species evolution. This book is a must read for anyone who has an interest in genetics or the future of our species and the species we rely on. Doudna explains in depth how gene editing works and takes a neutral position explaining the bad and good that will inevitably come from this futuristic technology.Doudna breaks the book into chapters based on different stages and effects of gene editing. The first 3 chapters don’t have much opinion or any sorts of argument. She just tells the story of how gene editing became a topic of research and how the first attempts at gene editing were unsuccessful until her work with CRISPR (a bacteria defense mechanism) found a cheap, reliable, and safe way to edit DNA in an incredibly accurate way. She begins talking about the ability to edit different foods DNA in a way that will eliminate much of our waste, increase nutritional value, and combat food shortages around the world. Dounda knows the amazing possibilities of CRISPR and how much good it can do for the world but knows that it’s an uphill fight against people who consider gene edited food to be dangerous. In her opinion the gene edited food is perfectly safe because no outside DNA was added, only changed within its own code. Changes that have occurred or could occur naturally by selective breeding or random mutation. After this chapter she looks at DNA editing in insects, animals, and humans. The first example she uses is mosquitos that have been modified so they can not contract or spread malaria. Eradicating malaria would be an amazing accomplishment for the entire world. She notes that close to 500,000 people die a year to malaria around the world. In her opinion this is a wonderful scenario that she believes should be put in place. On the other hand, other scientists have created germline edited mosquitos that only produce male offspring. Since these edits spread to their offspring all the male mosquitos born would impregnate female mosquitos and every mosquito offspring, they produce would only be male. This would eradicate all the mosquitos worldwide. Is eradicating a pest worldwide the right answer? Who decides if that is a power human should be able to control? Dounda believes for nature it would be okay, but if we take this step where will it end? Will we leap to reintroducing extinct species back into nature by using CRISPR to recreate them? It has been done and has been proven to be a viable option. She also brings up CRISPR edited animals. She compares things that would improve the lives of animals like cattle who are dehorned at a young age and things like designer pets. Should we just turn off the gene that makes cattle produce horns? Its been done in different labs around the world. Instead of burning the calf’s heads with hot metal we could simply turn off that gene and allow them to be born without horns. Is that more ethical than creating miniature animals like pigs? She talks about a lab in china that sells pigs who wont ever grow over 30lbs due to the gene for growth hormone being shut off. These pigs normally grow to around 200 lbs. but are stunted at 30 lbs. Aside from the extinct animals and designer pets, she believes there is a huge improvement for the world and for humans. There are labs that have created cattle that grow larger and produce up to 75% less greenhouse gas emissions. We would get more meat at the same time as we produce less waste for the environment. There are chickens, cattle, and pigs that are immune to most common diseases who require no antibiotics. Pigs that can digest phosphorus better and don’t put out phosphorus in waste which has contaminated some underground water and nearby streams. Finally, she comes to the use on humans. Some labs have already tested on human embryos which she believed to be unethical. She believes that use for therapy and curing of major diseases and cancers are not only possible but will be available within a few years and can end a lot of human suffering. She also mentioned the use for fixing individual issues is a completely different issue than changing germline DNA that will affect the course of human evolution. Some examples she included were deafness, some forms of blindness, and down syndrome as things that could be wiped out with germline editing. Will we agree that some of these uses are okay? In her opinion we are at a dangerous time in our thinking. We can decide now what is allowed and what is an ethical use of this powerful new tool.This book has an incredible amount of credibility. Dr. Doudna was the lead scientist in the lab that discovered the use of CRISPR as a gene editing tool. She has firsthand experience and more knowledge on how the subject became what it is today than almost anyone else in the world. She is backed up by Dr. Sternberg who runs a research lab at Columbia university. This book uses research from many other papers and labs around the world. All examples she talked about including the hornless cattle, virus immune farm animals, and malaria free mosquitos are from reliable sources cited in the end of the book. As far as credibility goes, this is about as credible as you can be. One of the strengths of this book is actually a weakness in my opinion. Dounda is one of the most educated people in the world when it comes to biology and the use of CRISPR, so her explanations and examples are very in depth. This is great if you have basic knowledge of chemistry, biology, and gene therapy. If you lack an understanding of any of those subjects some of the explanations can be slightly hard to understand. As far as any real weaknesses go this book ahead of many smaller articles that have little to back them up.This book can be found online in a few different places including Amazon. I purchase this book for $15.99 on the amazon website but it can also be purchased from audible as an audio book or an e-book and other websites like the Barnes and noble website. Much of Dr. Doudna’s work is published all over google. A quick search can find many of her experiments and experiments related to her research. Overall, this book was an interesting piece of literature and I believe it holds some of the most important and controversial scientific discoveries in our lifetime and maybe even in the history of human kind. We have the power to change our own evolution and the evolution of every living thing on the planet. This book explains how that became possible.Doudna, J. A., & Sternberg, S. H. (2018). A crack in creation: gene editing and the unthinkable power to control evolution. Boston: Mariner Books.

More often than not, it’s difficult to determine which new titles will have staying power 10, 20 or 50 years from now. But “A Crack in Creation” deserves to be on any short list of decidedly important nonfiction books of 2017.The reason is not simply because of the authors’ pedigree — co-author Jennifer Doudna is credited as the chief pioneer behind CRISPR, the potentially world-changing gene-editing technique. The book’s impact is also buttressed by the authors’ scientific rigor, deeply felt passion, and understanding of the world-changing consequences of their research.Doudna and Samuel Sternberg’s “A Crack in Creation” is two books in one. The first third is a short primer on genetic engineering and the scientists who’ve advanced the science over the years. While the attention to detail and footnote-rich documentation is commendable, the lay reader will be forgiven if she skips through some of the dry backstory to get to the good stuff in the remaining two-thirds of the book. Because few of us have yet to reckon with the significant issues raised by the recent breakthroughs in CRISPR research, which only came to light in 2012.As the authors write:“Many experts predicted that CRISPR would be a research biologist’s dream come true, enabling experiments that one could have only fantasized about doing before. I imagined that it would democratize a technology that had once been the privilege of the few. … Now, CRISPR seemed to be on everyone’s lips and the topic of every conversation. And yet it was still only the tip of the iceberg. …“As I sat on the plane flying back to San Francisco after that first trip to Cambridge, I could already see a new era of genetic command and control on the horizon—an era in which CRISPR would transform biologists’ shared toolkit by endowing them with the power to rewrite the genome virtually any way they desired. Instead of remaining an unwieldy, uninterpretable document, the genome would become as malleable as a piece of literary prose at the mercy of an editor’s red pen.”Doudna’s initial worries centered on whether scientists would prematurely use CRISPR without proper oversight or consideration of the risks and whether bad actors might use the technology for nefarious purposes. So she took the first halting steps to begin a public dialogue about the implications of CRISPR research, first by organizing a roundtable of 17 scientists in January 2015 and then a larger gathering later that year to discuss gene therapy and germline enhancement. Those discussions continue to this day.Meantime, other researchers and entrepreneurs got busy. Entire companies have sprung up with the mission of conquering such genetic disorders as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease and Duchene muscular dystrophy. The reader roots along with the authors in cheering on what amounts to the beginning of what might be called “the precision genetic medicine revolution.”It’s helpful that the authors translate scientific arcana into everyday language, as when they mention that a snippet of DNA being modified by CRISPR is “roughly one one-thousandth the width of a human hair” or that a molecule “acted like a set of GPS coordinates” to guide the replacement DNA to the right spot or when referring to an enzyme as a “motorized hedge clipper.”Many readers will be interested in not today’s practical applications in the lab but in what tomorrow may herald. Count me in the latter category, as I just finished writing a suspense novel with CRISPR at the centerpiece. What’s so fascinating about the technology’s future prospects? The authors write:“In the future, parents may be offered the option of selecting for traits that go beyond disease susceptibility and gender and cross into areas like behavior, physical appearance, or even intelligence. The list of known associations between certain gene variants and a diverse list of traits continues to grow, and as the PGD technology improves further, what’s to stop fertility clinics from consulting this genetic information so they can offer their consumers even more choices when it comes to selecting the most desirable or ‘best’ embryos?”Entire conferences and mountains of newsprint will be devoted to dissecting the implications of CRISPR usage on early stage human embryos in the decades ahead. The door has just been cracked ajar.Where does Doudna, the progenitor of CRISPR, come down on the ethical scales?“I don’t believe there’s an ethical defense for banning germline modification outright, nor do I think we can justifiably prevent parents from using CRISPR to improve their chances of having a healthy, genetically related child, so long as the methods are safe and are offered in an equitable manner. … [But we also need to] redouble our commitment to building a society in which all humans are respected and treated equally, regardless of their genetic makeup. …“Advances in gene editing are enabling us to rewrite the very language of life—and putting us closer to gaining near-complete control of our genetic destiny. Together, we can choose how best to harness this technology There’s simply no way to unlearn this new knowledge, so we must embrace it. But we must do so cautiously, and with the utmost respect for the unimaginable power it grants us.”Well said. The authors smartly observe that society as a whole needs to be in on the decision on whether to move forward with certain aspects of the gene-editing revolution, and that scientists need to demystify the technology so the public can “understand their implications and decide how to use them.” Let the robust debate begin.