CRISPR technology can be used in the germline to make heritable changes, and that's actually already been done with CRISPR in humans. It's a use that I think is still not something that we should be actively pursuing, for the most part. Why? Well, because I think that the technology is still not, has really not been evaluated in human embryos, so we don't really understand how it works there and whether it can be applied safely. Secondly, I don't think there are very many defensible use cases in the germline for humans. There may be some, but I think right now, for the most part, genetic diseases can be dealt with in other ways that don't involve germline editing. That being said, do I think that there's a future for this type of use of CRISPR? I think it's possible in the future, as the technology continues to get better and we understand better how it works in embryos, will there be certain situations or cases where you do an evaluation and you realize that, yeah, for this particular person or family, it would be better to use it in the germline? I think we have to be open to that.

[Huntington's is] a great example, where it's a dominant disease that involves a single gene that we know how we could treat it using CRISPR, and maybe it would be better just to remove it from a whole family rather than having to deal with it in individuals.

Dr. Jennifer Doudna is a biochemist and 2020 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. She is also the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health sciences as well as a professor of biochemistry, biophysics, and structural biology. Her work focuses on RNA interference and gene editing.

In 1985, she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in biochemistry from Pomona College and in 1989 received her PhD in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard Medical School. From 1991 to 1994, she was a Lucille P. Markey post-doctoral scholar in Biomedical science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She also received fellowships from the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

From 1994 to 2001, Dr. Doudna was an associate professor and full professor at Yale University. In 2002, Dr. Douda accepted a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology position at the University of California, Berkeley. She has also been researching with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997, and her work with CRISPR-Cas9 and other genome-engineering techniques has led to breakthroughs in human and agricultural genomics research. At the Doudna Lab, researchers focus on determining mechanisms of novel genome editing tools for in vitro usage in plants and mammals as well as anti-CRISPR agents.

Dr. Doudna has received numerous awards for her work including the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a method for genome editing, the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2016 Japan Prize, the 2019 Welfare Betterment Prize, the 2020 Wolf Prize in Medicine, and the 2025 National Medal of Technology and Innovation. She is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, and a member of the Royal Society.