Fireside Chat, Interview, Conference Presentation, Product Demonstration
Walter Isaacson, Historian and Author of "The Code Breaker"
- Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier are expected to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the CRISPR gene-editing tool based on the discovery that RNA can cut DNA and build proteins.
- A Nobel Prize in Medicine is expected to be awarded in the future, likely within a couple of years of the 2020 announcement, to Feng Zhang, George Church, and David Liu for applying CRISPR in human cells and developing base and prime editing technologies.
- The ability to use RNA as a messenger is expected to remain central to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines currently distributed, while CRISPR technology, which enabled specific gene cutting in 2012, is expected to follow a similar trajectory of widespread medical application.
- Competition for patents and prizes is predicted to have distorted the scientific community over the past 20 or 30 years by reducing collaboration, though a balance between cooperation and competition is expected to return as seen during the coronavirus pandemic.
- Great men theories are predicted to dominate medical research before abruptly transitioning, moving forward one death at a time, while the Human Genome Project is expected to have successfully allowed reading of the human genome around the year 2000.
- State-sponsored eugenics resembling Nazi experiments is not expected to recur, but a "free market eugenics" driven by individual fertility clinic choices is identified as a potential future risk where traits like height or skin color could be selected.
- Editing children to meet a "perfect child" standard is expected to create an ethically tricky situation that reduces societal diversity, while editing personality traits such as dispositions for schizophrenia or manic depression is expected to remain a difficult decision with no clear right answer.
- A case-by-case approach is expected to guide future policy, permitting edits for debilitating diseases like sickle cell or cystic fibrosis while remaining skeptical of enhancements to mental capacity or memory.
- Competition is predicted to spur human advancement across various fields, including Goldman Sachs, journalism, and Washington, while the CRISPR technology is only eight years old at the time of the 2020 announcement.
- It is noted that a Nobel Prize typically waits a couple of decades before being awarded for CRISPR innovations, and the host is expected to highly recommend the book The Codebreaker for purchase and reading.