 My name is Jennifer Doudna. I'm a professor at University of California, Berkeley, and I work on something called gene editing. I think in the future it will be possible to use gene editing to help species that are under tremendous pressure from the environment in different ways. And you know the example that I like to think about actually is protecting trees, trees that are under real duress due to the bark beetle. What if we could actually put protective genes into the trees that would protect them or possibly going the other way make modifications to the bark beetle so they don't have the capability to attack the trees. I think scientists have been really tethered to a few model organisms that could be manipulated genetically and now with this tool we have a way to change the DNA in essentially any type of organism. And so what we're seeing in the scientific world is that this is opening up opportunities to understand life in many new niches. Being able to make a single letter change in the DNA of the human genome in a way that would for example cure genetic disease. The gene editing technology that is available today is already you know sufficient to cure the defect that causes sickle cell anemia in cells that are cultured in the laboratory. By 2021 we will certainly see more clinical trials going forward. Right now the trials that are approved are all for cancer and therefore doing a particular type of editing that might be impactful in treating cancer namely being able to program a patient's own immune cells to target and destroy their cancer cells. But I think that going forward we will see increasing efforts to address genetic diseases of the blood of the eye of the liver and then probably farther down the road diseases that affect other tissues. The opportunities to really understand and we hope in the future to effectively treat or even cure genetic disease in humans is just profound. You know there's a lot of interest in what's called de-extinction. The idea that you could bring back an organism that is no longer walking the earth by using gene editing to make modifications to a genome of an existing organism let's say that it reintroduces genes that have been lost. Whether you could really bring back a dinosaur you know that's a much harder challenge. We don't really know the DNA sequence that would encode a dinosaur and you know in Jurassic Park you may remember that the premise of Michael Crichton's story was that you know that there were insects trapped in resin that contained blood from dinosaurs that had DNA still available for sequencing and unfortunately DNA just is a chemical that doesn't last 65 million years so I think you know being able to do that is not so likely but you know maybe it's possible to by sort of bootstrapping piecing together information we have about amphibians about birds it might be possible to start sort of walking in that direction and I don't know how close you could get to a real dinosaur but certainly we'll learn a lot about the genetic traits that are encoded in DNA that give rise to some of the traits that we think dinosaurs had. Another area that is a little bit farther afield but I think again might intersect in interesting ways with gene editing is imaging being able to visualize cells at a level that has been impossible in the past so what if you could really look inside of a cell and see molecules watch them behaving watch them functioning I think this is going to be incredible and I think this will probably really again be a very transformative type of effort that will happen over the next few years is to really start allowing us to see the cellular world in ways that have been impossible before.
 My name is Jennifer Doudna. I'm a professor at University of California,
 Berkeley, and I work on something called gene editing. I think in the future it
 will be possible to use gene editing to help species that are under tremendous
 pressure from the environment in different ways. And you know the example
 that I like to think about actually is protecting trees, trees that are under
 real duress due to the bark beetle. What if we could actually put protective
 genes into the trees that would protect them or possibly going the other way
 make modifications to the bark beetle so they don't have the capability to attack
 the trees. I think scientists have been really tethered to a few model
 organisms that could be manipulated genetically and now with this tool we
 have a way to change the DNA in essentially any type of organism. And so
 what we're seeing in the scientific world is that this is opening up
 opportunities to understand life in many new niches. Being able to make a single
 letter change in the DNA of the human genome in a way that would for example
 cure genetic disease. The gene editing technology that is available today is
 already you know sufficient to cure the defect that causes sickle cell anemia in
 cells that are cultured in the laboratory. By 2021 we will certainly see
 more clinical trials going forward. Right now the trials that are approved are all
 for cancer and therefore doing a particular type of editing that might be
 impactful in treating cancer namely being able to program a patient's own
 immune cells to target and destroy their cancer cells. But I think that going
 forward we will see increasing efforts to address genetic diseases of the blood
 of the eye of the liver and then probably farther down the road diseases
 that affect other tissues. The opportunities to really understand and
 we hope in the future to effectively treat or even cure genetic disease in
 humans is just profound. You know there's a lot of interest in what's called
 de-extinction. The idea that you could bring back an organism that is no longer
 walking the earth by using gene editing to make modifications to a genome of an
 existing organism let's say that it reintroduces genes that have been lost.
 Whether you could really bring back a dinosaur you know that's a much harder
 challenge. We don't really know the DNA sequence that would encode a dinosaur
 and you know in Jurassic Park you may remember that the premise of Michael
 Crichton's story was that you know that there were insects trapped in resin that
 contained blood from dinosaurs that had DNA still available for sequencing and
 unfortunately DNA just is a chemical that doesn't last 65 million years so I
 think you know being able to do that is not so likely but you know maybe it's
 possible to by sort of bootstrapping piecing together information we have
 about amphibians about birds it might be possible to start sort of walking in
 that direction and I don't know how close you could get to a real dinosaur
 but certainly we'll learn a lot about the genetic traits that are encoded in
 DNA that give rise to some of the traits that we think dinosaurs had. Another area
 that is a little bit farther afield but I think again might intersect in
 interesting ways with gene editing is imaging being able to visualize cells at
 a level that has been impossible in the past so what if you could really look
 inside of a cell and see molecules watch them behaving watch them functioning I
 think this is going to be incredible and I think this will probably really
 again be a very transformative type of effort that will happen over the next
 few years is to really start allowing us to see the cellular world in ways that
 have been impossible before.