These home testing kits will help bring biology into our home and bring us into a whole new era where we can do easy self-diagnosis of the things happening in our body. That's going to be a great platform: these CRISPR home-based tests upon which people will build all sorts of wonderful medical tools. There's going to be these wonderful CRISPR-based home testing kits that build directly on the discovery that won the Nobel Prize for, which is using this old technology that bacteria have, called CRISPR, to say, 'I can spot any virus, just by reading the genetic code of things in my body.' And so, we'll be able to have these in which, just in a minute, you can detect not only viruses or flu, you can detect bacteria, you could detect cancer, you can do your gut microbiome.

On CRISPR home testing kits, soon available to the public If we want to change a gene, we can do so. So we can take this billion-year-old tool that bacteria have and reprogram it so we can aim at any sequence of DNA we want to change in our own bodies. discovered is that we can engineer this system that bacteria have and say, OK, we'll code in the place we want the DNA cut. And that's just what we, of course, need in this day when we're being attacked by wave after wave of viruses. So that allows the bacteria to have an adaptive immune system, meaning every time a new wave of virus comes along, it takes that mug shot and will be able to fight it off the next time. So that when the virus attacks again, the bacteria remembers it and uses a little guide RNA and a pair of 'scissors' (an enzyme that acts as a pair of scissors) and cuts up the invading virus. Whenever viruses attack certain bacteria, those bacteria do something very clever: They take a mugshot and they put it in their own genetic material of the bacteria. On how the gene editing technology CRISPR mimics what the immune system does to bacteria And so this part of the 21st century, I think, will be a biotech revolution, a life sciences revolution.

And now with Jennifer Doudna and the things that she and her colleagues have invented, we found ways to rewrite that genome. And in the beginning of this century, in 2000 or so, we sequenced the entire human genome. Now we've come to another particle, a fundamental particle of our existence, which is the gene. This part of the 21st century, I think, will be a biotech revolution, a life sciences revolution in which we'll be able to rewrite the code of life.

The code breaker jennifer doudna