ON CRISPR Episode 3: Patent Wars

Summary

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ON CRISPR: The Story of Jennifer Doudna

Episode 3: Patent Wars

iHeartPodcasts & Kaleidoscope | Airdate: September 24, 2025

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Main Theme:

This episode dives deep into the high-stakes, fast-paced competition—both collaborative and cutthroat—behind the patent disputes for CRISPR gene-editing technology. The episode explores the personalities, motivations, and pressures surrounding Jennifer Doudna and her collaborators (and rivals), focusing on who would be recognized as the true inventors of one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the century.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights:

1. The “Celebrity” of Gene Editing: George Church

• [03:05–04:23]
  • Introduced as a superstar and mentor in synthetic biology, George Church is described as “the godfather of synthetic biology,” a mentor to both Jennifer Doudna and Feng Zhang.
  • Church’s style is painted as both eccentric and influential: “a true gentleman scientist wrapped in the cloak of being a madman scientist. ... He's just as comfortable at the lab bench as he is on the Colbert TV show.” (Walter Isaacson, 03:12–03:30)

2. The Race: From Test Tube to Human Cell

• [04:23–06:57]

  • In 2012, after Doudna and Charpentier’s landmark CRISPR paper, the contest was on to show the technique worked in human cells—not just test tubes.
  • Feng Zhang (Broad Institute, MIT/Harvard), another Church protégé, is introduced as a major competitor.

  Quote:

  • “So for the next six to seven months, you have a great race around the world of scientists trying to show how this new combination ... can edit human genes.”
    — Walter Isaacson [04:36]

  • The triangle of competition formed: Doudna vs. Zhang vs. Church, each with close personal and professional ties complicated by rivalry.

3. The Shift from Collaboration to Competition

• [07:06–08:13]

  • Early openness—Zhang emailing Doudna to discuss her results—gave way to secrecy as the stakes rose.

  Quote:

  • “Suppose there was no real competition and everybody worked together. Well, that would actually be friendlier and nicer. But maybe we wouldn’t have pushed science so far so fast if there wasn’t an award for getting there first.”
    — Walter Isaacson [07:38]

4. What Counts as Scientific “First”?

• [08:22–10:13]

  • Is it the breakthrough in the test tube or in a living cell that should be celebrated as the crucial leap?
  • Doudna argues for the test tube’s foundational importance, while Zhang highlights applied results in human cells.

  Quote:

  • “She would argue the big leap is figuring out the exact ingredients ... it wasn’t that big of a leap to do it in a cell. Now I think she’s minimizing the importance of doing it in a living cell. But that’s why there was a big dispute afterwards.”
    — Walter Isaacson [09:28]

5. The Publication & Patent “Finish Line”

• [10:21–13:41]

  • The scientists raced to publish first—Church and Zhang beat Doudna by just a week or two.
  • Publication date determines credit in the scientific community, but patent law operates by slightly different rules, focusing on who can prove priority.

  Quote:

  • “Close doesn’t count when it comes to patents or prizes.”
    — Walter Isaacson [11:28]

  • Lab notebooks, with discoveries logged and witnessed, become vital evidence in legal disputes.

6. Why Patent Gene-Editing Discoveries?

• [13:41–16:41]

  • The episode traces the history of patenting academic research, back to the days of Genentech's founding, and the Bayh-Dole Act, allowing universities and inventors to benefit from commercialization.
  • Isaacson emphasizes how this system both inspires rapid progress and funds further research.

  Quote:

  • “That patent ends up becoming the formation of this multi-billion dollar company, Genentech. [Now] patents become more important. America has a great system of allowing people to patent the type of research they did at universities…”
    — Walter Isaacson [14:01]
  • “It costs a lot of money to build that lab at Berkeley ... that’s a huge investment.”
    — Walter Isaacson [15:59]

7. Consortium or Competition? The Failed Truce

• [19:45–22:00]

  • After their near-simultaneous human-cell CRISPR papers, the major players briefly considered forming a joint company to share and commercialize their patents.
  • Tensions and mistrust—especially Doudna’s suspicion that Zhang and Church’s teams were excluding her from critical dealings—derailed this possibility.

  Quote:

  • “She just feels the guys are ganging up on me and I don’t want any part of this. And she pulls out.”
    — Walter Isaacson [20:45]

  • The episode notes the field’s ongoing complexity, with companies, universities, and researchers cross-licensing patents and navigating a complicated IP landscape—something that continues to this day.

8. Ethics, Honor, and the Nature of Scientific Competition

• [22:00–24:57]

  • Isaacson weighs in on whether Zhang was “Machiavellian” in his swift, secretive patent moves: not unethical per se, but not up to Church’s preferred standards of collegiality.

  Quote:

  • “Yes, what he did was in the bounds of all the rules of ethics, but it’s not the way I would have had him do it if he had still been part of my lab. ... There’s a system of honor that goes beyond the ethics of are you supposed to tell the other side...”
    — George Church via Walter Isaacson [22:42]

9. The Big Deal: What Made CRISPR So Revolutionary?

• [24:57–26:34]

  • What distinguishes CRISPR from earlier gene-editing? Programmability, speed, and ease—gene editing now as simple as “cut and paste” in a digital document.

  Quote:

  • “With CRISPR, you can instantly program it to cut wherever you want in the gene. ... This is the difference between being a monk ... and having an amazing cut and paste computer programming type thing...”
    — Walter Isaacson [25:18]

10. Scientific Credit and Narrative: Eric Lander’s “Heroes of CRISPR”

• [26:34–29:27]

  • Eric Lander’s published paper “Heroes of CRISPR” downplayed Doudna and Charpentier—leading to accusations of gender bias and conflict of interest since Broad Institute (Lander’s base) was in the patent fight.

  Quote:

  • “He minimizes what Jennifer Douden, Emmanuel Charpentier, does ... and then paragraph after paragraph on how important it was that Fong Zhang was able to make it work in the human cell. This causes only the type of controversy that can happen when you combine basic science with Twitter...”
    — Walter Isaacson [27:13]

• Isaacson found himself unexpectedly drawn into efforts to mediate, moderate, and clarify public perceptions in the escalating dispute.

11. Isaacson’s Role as Biographer and Mediator

• [29:27–31:46]

  • Isaacson reflects on balancing journalistic objectivity with honesty about his own involvement—sometimes literally brokering peace talks between key figures.

  Quote:

  • “As a reporter, I was trained to stay out of it, never to put yourself in a story. ... With the Jennifer Doudna book, I try not to insert myself in it unnecessarily. But at one point, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier just are barely speaking to each other ... and I was just trying to see if I could make sure that there was no misunderstandings between them.”
    — Walter Isaacson [29:39]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Close doesn’t count when it comes to patents or prizes.”
  — Walter Isaacson [11:28]

• “Suppose there was no real competition and everybody worked together. Well, that would actually be friendlier and nicer. But maybe we wouldn’t have pushed science so far so fast…”
  — Walter Isaacson [07:38]

• “She just feels the guys are ganging up on me and I don’t want any part of this. And she pulls out.”
  — Walter Isaacson [20:45]

• “Enzymes are catalysts. They cause things to happen and you have to be careful that you’re not distorting the narrative by being there, that you’re not too much of a catalyst.”
  — Walter Isaacson [31:08]

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Timeline of Critical Segments

| Timestamp | Segment & Key Points | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:05 | Introduction to George Church’s outsized influence and personality. | | 04:23 | Race to apply CRISPR in a human cell, introduction of Feng Zhang. | | 07:06 | Competition grows fierce; collaboration gives way to secrecy. | | 08:22 | The debate about what counts as the crucial advance—the test tube or the living cell? | | 11:28 | Race to publish—Doudna narrowly misses being first. | | 13:41 | Lab notebooks and the nuances of IP “priority” and patent law. | | 14:01 | History of university research patents, Bayh-Dole Act. | | 19:45 | Attempt—and failure—to form a collaborative consortium for CRISPR commercialization. | | 22:23 | Ethical reflections on Zhang’s patent tactics and Church’s sense of scientific honor. | | 25:18 | Why CRISPR is as revolutionary as “cut and paste” for genes. | | 26:57 | Eric Lander’s controversial role in shaping the narrative and ensuing backlash. | | 29:39 | Isaacson discusses his complicated role as observer, story-shaper, mediator. | | 31:46 | Preview of next episode—focus on ethical dilemmas that follow the patent fights. |

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Episode Tone and Style

The episode balances captivating storytelling with rigorous scientific and ethical analysis, propelled by Walter Isaacson’s warm, anecdotal style and Evan Ratliff’s journalistic curiosity. The tone is conversational and accessible but layered with tension, reflecting the competitive, sometimes personal drama that underpins massive advances in modern science.

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Next episode: The ethical maze CRISPR gene editing opens up for humanity and for Jennifer Doudna personally.

Transcript

[Walter Isaacson]

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[Walter Isaacson]

Kaleidoscope.

[Evan Ratliff]

Welcome back everybody.

[Podcast Advertiser]

My next guest is a Harvard medical professor, a biologist, a geneticist, a chemist and an engineer who's worked with DNA is transforming our biology and our future. Please welcome George Church.

[Evan Ratliff]

When it comes to gene editing researchers, George Church is the closest person in the field to an actual real world celebrity.

[Walter Isaacson]

George Church is a true gentleman scientist wrapped in the cloak of being a madman scientist. He has a bushy beard. He wants to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction. He talks in this very flamboyant way. He's just as comfortable at the lab bench as he is on the Colbert TV show.

[Evan Ratliff]

For some, he's known as the godfather of synthetic biology for his foundational work on gene editing technology. But for most people today, he's best known as the co founder of Colossal Biosciences, a company that's embarked on the ambitious mission of de extincting species. Most recently the direwolf. And so when there's anything exciting happening in the field of gene editing, you can bet George Church has been involved with it in some way. Isaacson tells me that the development of CRISPR was no exception. He was one of the researchers working on it and a close advisor to Jennifer Doudna at the time.

[Walter Isaacson]

He's become this mentor to a lot of people in the biotech world, including Jennifer Doudna. And I think he started maybe three dozen companies. So he's not just a great researcher. He applies it.

[Evan Ratliff]

It was 2012, and now that Doudna and Charpentier had successfully published their paper on how the CRISPR Cas9 mechanism worked, the next challenge for them was to translate their findings from the test tube to the human cell.

[Walter Isaacson]

Well, the end of the piece they write, they hint that this could be used as a tool for editing genes. But what they've done is only shown that it works in a test tube they haven't shown in it can work in a human cell. And so for the next six to seven months, you have a great race around the world of scientists trying to show how this new combination of RNA, an enzyme, a Cas enzyme, a little manufactured thing, can edit human genes.

[Evan Ratliff]

And within this global race to figure out how CRISPR could edit our cells, one competitor came to the forefront. A competitor who had also been mentored by George Church, a Harvard scientist named Feng Zhang.

[Walter Isaacson]

Feng Zhang is a great American story. His mother came over from China on some fellowship to Iowa and just saw how the labs and the universities and the schools and the high schools in Iowa were so good that she ends up bringing her young kid Feng Zhang to America. And he becomes sort of a star in high school in Iowa and eventually goes on studies with George Church at Harvard and becomes a great biochemist and microbiologist.

[Evan Ratliff]

Feng Zheng was working at the Broad Institute, a collaboration between Harvard and mit, when the race to apply CRISPR in human cells was heating up. And so a triangle of competition was born. George Church, Jennifer Doudna, and Feng Zhang, they were all racing towards the same goal. And Isaacson says that Church, faced with competing with two of his proteges, found himself in a tricky situation.

[Walter Isaacson]

It's complicated because he's very close to Jennifer Doudna, had been an advisor and mentor, and he was close to Feng Zhang, who had worked in his lab. And so he's conflicted a bit. He ends up wanting to help Jennifer. Feng Zhang is working behind his back, doesn't tell George Church that he's trying to do this, and all three of them, at about the same time, sort of circle in on how do we prove it can work in a human cell.

[Evan Ratliff]

What came next would fuel one of the most disputed questions around scientific discovery in the past decades. Who owns CRISPR?

[Podcast Advertiser]

Evan.

[Evan Ratliff]

I'm Evan Ratliff, and this is on CRISPR, the story of Jennifer Doudna. Episode 3 Patton Wars. So you have these three labs who are chasing this question, will this work in a human cell? But again, you have this kind of competition, cooperation, because Fong Zhang has previously reached out to. To Doudna, been in contact with her, because he wants to understand her work.

[Walter Isaacson]

Fang Zhang originally sends an email to Jennifer Doudna, say, I've read your piece. I want to figure out how it's going to work. But they soon realize the stakes are too high and they all become more secretive and more competitive. The question is, is that a bad thing? Suppose there was no real competition and everybody worked together. Well, that would actually be friendlier and nicer. But maybe we wouldn't have pushed science so far so fast if there weren't an award for getting there first.

[Evan Ratliff]

Isaacson tells me that if Doudna and Feng Zhang were racing on a track, Zhang would have started in the pole position. Even if Doudna might not have realized.

[Walter Isaacson]

It, she started off at a disadvantage. She had never worked in living cells before. She had only done it in a test tube. Now you can have an argument, as they did, about what is the more important way to show something works. Is it best to be able to show it in a living cell in the real world? Well, that sounds logical, but actually to be able to show it working in a test tube means that you know the exact components, you know exactly which ingredients are necessary or not. Whereas if you're doing it in the human cell, there's all sorts of messy other things happening. So a Jennifer would say being able to do the biochemistry in a test tube, that's actually the big deal. And Fong Zhang and others might say, no, no, test tubes are easy. Doing it in a living cell is the big leap.

[Evan Ratliff]

But they both knew that it would be a huge discovery, whoever got there first in terms of making it work in the human cell.

[Walter Isaacson]

They both felt it would be a big discovery to be able to do it first in the human cell. But Jennifer would argue and did argue that's not that big of a leap once you know the ingredients that can work and attest to, we've always had these things and it's always been pretty ordinary and standard to then apply them in the human cell. So she would argue the big leap is figuring out the exact ingredients and that every other gene editing tool, once you had done that, it wasn't that big of a leap to do it in a cell. Now I think she's minimizing the importance of doing it in a living cell. But that's why there was a big dispute afterwards.

[Evan Ratliff]

But regardless of their starting positions, both Doudna and Zhang knew that what mattered was who was first to the finish line.

[Walter Isaacson]

The huge race is to actually be published first because that's the way you put a stamp on I got there first. And Jennifer knew that she was running behind that. Jennifer Doudna learns in a phone conversation from George Church that not only is George Church trying to make it work in human cells, which is logical. He admitted done that his whole career. He had made other types of technology work in human cells. But George Church also says Fong Zhang is doing it too. So Jennifer tries to speed up. She finds a publication that's online only and that will rush it into publication. But she still, she and Martin Yinick have to finish all the experiments and show that it can be made to work. And so over Christmas, she's doing it. And then finally, at the very beginning of January 2013, when she's ready to send it in, Boom. Science magazine, the grandest of all the magazine goes online and it has both George Church's paper and Fong Zhang's paper showing how it works in humans. Right before Feng Zhang and George Church simultaneously of publishing, Fong Zhang casually sends Jennifer an email saying, hey, my paper's about to be published. So her heart sinks. She knows she's going to lose the race by about one or two weeks because that's when her paper will be published. And that may seem pretty close in time. But close doesn't count when it comes to patents or prizes.

[Evan Ratliff]

Yeah, just the idea that it doesn't matter when you knew it. It matters when that paper appears somewhere in the world.

[Walter Isaacson]

One of the complexities is the winner of the race is who published it as a paper first. But the winner of a patent is a slightly more complicated task, which is, even if you haven't published it, if you can show you've made a certain discovery at a certain point and you eventually get it done, it can count in what's called a priority dispute. And so even now, I mean, we're 10 years later, there's still a patent war going on, and they're still showing pages in the notebook where they show when they made each experiment.

[Evan Ratliff]

The notebook, a simple analog object, would become a critical piece of evidence in the timeline of CRISPR's invention. Isaacson tells me that Jennifer Doudna knew that she could prove that she had discovered the mechanism first just by looking back at her notes each day.

[Walter Isaacson]

A great scientist who makes any discovery that day will put it in a lab notebook and get two people to witness it on the bottom of the page. And early on, with the first CRISPR discoveries, Jennifer Doudna did her husband, who's also a biochemist. That's important enough. You got to go back to the lab, put it in the notebook, and she got two of her graduate students to witness it. So this is how important this claims of priority can be.

[Evan Ratliff]

You've mentioned patents a couple of times, and I feel like there was, of course, a time when if someone made this kind of breakthrough in a lab at a university, it wouldn't be patented necessarily. So what led to these different university associated labs seeking patents on this type of discovery?

[Walter Isaacson]

In the early 1970s, Herbert Boyer and others working at Stanford and universities in that area had come up with genetic engineering advances. How to do recombinant DNA, it was called, to make new types of organisms. And at one point, the Stanford lawyers helped some of them get a patent. And the other scientists thought, hey, that's not what we're doing here. We're doing research for the basic good. But that patent ends up becoming the formation of this multi billion dollar company, Genentech. So around then, patents become more important. America has a great system of allowing people to patent the type of research they did at universities, even if the government helped fund that research. And it was two senators, Bob Dole and Birch Bayh, came up with an act that said, how do we allocate it? If the federal government pays for research at the university. And it's a slightly complicated formula, but the professor gets a stake, the university gets a stake, the government has a right to use the patented material, and it becomes a great engine for commercializing basic science. And some people, especially in the old days at Harvard or even in the early 70s, felt that's not good. You shouldn't be trying to own this intellectual property. By the 1970s it was clear we wanted research labs and research professors to be able to make a buck if they made discoveries in order to sort.

[Evan Ratliff]

Of drive that same competitive spirit.

[Walter Isaacson]

If you look around the world at where the greatest advances come in biotech and genetic engineering and the Internet in searches like Google, which were done at a Stanford University under a government grant, it tends to happen in the US because you're able to get rewarded if you make discoveries, but it also funds them. It costs a lot of money to build that lab at Berkeley with all of the not just the benches, but the hoods and the ventilation and the test tubes and the pipettes and the graduate students being paid to do things. That's a huge investment.

[Evan Ratliff]

We'll be right back.

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[Evan Ratliff]

Coming back to our trio of scientific racers, Doudna, Jung and Church. They would all publish their papers close together in 2013 detailing how CRISPR could work in human cells. And while the patent question was still up in the air, Isaacson says they began to explore the possibility of linking arms and creating a joint company to.

[Walter Isaacson]

Share the ownership after they all figure out how to make it work in a human cell in this great race. And in January 2013, each published their papers. Initially they start to work together, with George Church being the Ben Franklin type, trying to bring everybody together and starting a company in which all of their intellectual property, any patents they get, anything in the future will all be part of one consortium and they'll be able to commercialize it and make it work. The venture capitalists in Boston in particular are investing in a big company that's going to do it. And yet there was a lot of bad feelings. And I think in particular in the book there's this Jennifer describing that she thought Fang Zhang was working with the venture capitalists behind her back and it Turns out he had filed for an expedited patent application without telling her and the group. And she just feels the guys are ganging up on me and I don't want any part of this. And she pulls out. And then she thought, well, maybe I'll do it with Emanuel Sharpenjay. But Emmanuel Scharpentje, she's off in her own world. She wanted her own thing. I think eventually they're gonna all have to cross license the patents. But it almost worked at the beginning to have one consortium. But now if you want to make a treatment for sickle cell anemia, for other, you know, for type of blindness, and you're using crispr, sometimes you got to figure out, which of these patents do I have to license them all. The field would be better off if they could settle their patent dispute.

[Evan Ratliff]

And you, as you're reporting the book, you are moving, as we discussed, you're moving across, talking to all the players involved. Where did you land in terms of Fong Zhang's actions, pursuing the expedited patent, for example, being Machiavellian versus having pure motives around trying to accelerate the discovery?

[Walter Isaacson]

I think Fong Zhang is a decent, good person and a great scientist. And what he was doing was in the realm of regular ethical conduct, which is trying to get the patent first, rushing the patent application, and many other things. And what he also did was keeping it secret. Well, that's not against the ethics rules. But as George Church said to me, yes, what he did was in the bounds of all the rules of ethics, but it's not the way I would have had him do it if he had still been part of my lab. That's not the way we work. There's a system of honor that goes beyond the ethics of are you supposed to tell the other side, or how open do you have to be? I don't think Fong Zhang is a manipulative or deceitful person, but he did decide to pursue his own course a little bit secretively. And that rubbed George Church the wrong way.

[Evan Ratliff]

And is part of it the way that the incentives change when you move from, you know, when you're talking about trying to understand bacteria in a salt pool somewhere, there's discovery incentive and there's curiosity that's driving you. But when you reach this point, you have possible financial incentives that come into play. These are businesses that are being started. Did you feel like that played a role in how people responded to the situation?

[Walter Isaacson]

One of the things that happens at one of these breakfasts in Cambridge or meetings where they're all trying to figure out how to pool together their patents and maybe have one big company is. Jennifer asks George Church, how big of a deal do you think this is, this editing genes using CRISPR patent? And he basically says, brace yourself. This is one of the biggest things ever to come down the pike. So when the stakes get to be so big and you realize this may be the biggest discovery of the decade and it may have huge financial implications, then that's a little bit different than trying to share research on exactly how the sequences of CRISPR might work in different bacteria.

[Evan Ratliff]

So let's try to help people understand why it is such a world changing, potentially world changing development. Because people may know, well, we could sort of edit genes before this, and they've heard of gene editing. So what is the fundamental breakthrough when it comes to human cells and gene editing that CRISPR allows that we couldn't do before?

[Walter Isaacson]

Before, when you had to edit, you could do something very tailored and complicated. But it wasn't like programming a microchip, which we can, you know, do in 40 seconds if we want to fiddle with a program. With crispr, you can instantly program it to cut wherever you want in the gene. And then if you decide, well, there's some other place we want it, you just tap, tap, tap, and you get a new one. So it's very easy. And with the combined single RNA guide we talked about, it becomes pretty easy to get it into the cell. So this is the different between being a monk doing a scribe work on a great manuscript and being able to edit it with a quill pen and having a amazing cut and paste computer programming type thing where you can cut and paste and change. So CRISPR at its foundation using CRISPR Cas9, the enzyme, and the tool becomes a foundation for even more tools, and that will allow us to rewrite our genetic code.

[Evan Ratliff]

At this point in the story, the wider scientific community and the public are becoming aware of the importance of crispr. The initial attempt at a consortium has devolved into separate competing companies. And it's also a point where Isaacson becomes unexpectedly pulled into the dispute over who pioneered crispr. It all starts with a paper written by Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute where Feng Zheng works.

[Walter Isaacson]

One of the things that Eric Lander does, who ran the Broad Institute where Feng Zhang was working, decided he wanted to make sure that Fong Zhang and his team got credit. And he wrote a scientific paper that got published called the Heroes of crispr. It's actually a very good paper and it Takes you through every person involved in the process, starting with Francisco Mojica, the guy in Spain who sees it in the original microbes in saltwater ponds. But he minimizes what Jennifer Douden, Emmanuel Charpentier, does in sort of a dismissive part of a paragraph saying, a good scientist say this, and then paragraph after paragraph on how important it was that Fong Zhang was able to make it work in the human cell. This causes only the type of controversy that can happen when you combine basic science with Twitter, in which Twitter mobs are accusing Eric Lander of being sexist and doing to Emmanuel Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna what Jim Watson had done to Rosalind Franklin and writing them out of history, and also not disclosing when he wrote the piece, that his institute was in a patent battle with all of them. So it becomes a mini scandal in the world of science.

[Evan Ratliff]

And then one of the people enlisted to help resolve that scandal is you.

[Walter Isaacson]

At a certain point, the people at Harvard want to restrain Eric Lander from. From going too far. And they know it's gotten a bit unseemly. So I got a call from somebody who said, can you host Eric Lander and a group of science reporters and writers and technicians in Washington and walk them through the CRISPR story? And we're going to get him prepared to say nice things about Jennifer Doudna to try to resolve the controversy? And Eric couldn't quite do it. I kept saying, all right, but when the role of Jennifer. And he said, oh, yeah, they did okay. And I could see the person from Harvard who was trying to orchestrate this kind of shrug and roll her eyes. But I love Eric, partly because he's just so competitive.

[Evan Ratliff]

And was there a part of you that resisted getting involved? Did you think, well, if I'm involved, I'll just write it into the book? Or did you say, I'm trying to stay out of this?

[Walter Isaacson]

As a reporter, I was trained to stay out of it, never to put yourself in a story. And over the years, I realized you're more honest with the reader. Plus, you can make it a better understanding if you hold the reader's hands and say, well, here's what I was doing and how I got involved. And so with the Jennifer Doudna book, I try not to insert myself in it unnecessarily. But at one point, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Sharpenjay just are barely speaking to each other, even though they're partners. And Jennifer says, can you call her up? And I had a joint session with them on Zoom, and I was just trying to see if I could make sure that there was no misunderstandings between them. And so when I was asked to do this thing for Eric Lander, I said if I'm upfront with the reader and I explain exactly why I was doing it, and it's actually truer to the situation than if I pretend to have not been involved. Even when I'm at a CRISPR conference like in Quebec City, and I decide to go out instead of with Jennifer Doudna's group, I decided to go to a restaurant with Fong Zhang's group and hear his side of the story. Instead of just reporting his side of the story, I'm make it clear they're competing dinners that night. And here's why I decided to go to this one.

[Evan Ratliff]

You're like an enzyme, maybe that's supercharging the competition just by showing up and saying, I'm going to write the story about this.

[Walter Isaacson]

Yeah. I mean, enzymes are catalysts. They cause things to happen and you have to be careful that you're not distorting the narrative by being there, that you're not too much of a catalyst. On the other hand, when the story is happening around you when you're a part of it. When I'm asked to moderate a panel at one of the later CRISPR conferences at Cold Spring Harbor, I want to do what's best for the reader in explaining how the tale unfolds.

[Evan Ratliff]

As of this recording, the dispute over who discovered CRISPR Cas9 is ongoing. In the next episode of On CRISPR, we delve into the ethical implications that gene editing technology brings and how Jennifer Doudna grappled with them both professionally and personally on crispr. The Story of Jennifer Doudna is a production of Kaleidoscope and I Heart. This show is based on the writing and reporting of Walter Isaacson. It's hosted by me, Evan Ratliff, and produced by Adriana Tapia with assistance from Alex Zonenfeld. It was mixed by Kyle Murdoch and our studio engineer was Thomas Walsh. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesha Tikador from Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell from iheart Podcasts. If you enjoy hearing stories about visionaries in science and technology, check out our other seasons based on the biographies that Walter Isaacson has written on Musk for an intimate dive into all facets of Elon Musk and on Benjamin Franklin to understand how his scientific curiosity shaped society as we know it.

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