Isaacson: Feng Zhang Beat Doudna's Team by Two Weeks to Human CRISPR Patents
Walter Isaacson · #121 Walter Isaacson: Curiosity Fuels Creativity · Oct 5, 2021 · at 59:11
Biographer Walter Isaacson details the scientific race between Jennifer Doudna and MIT/Harvard's Feng Zhang to demonstrate CRISPR gene editing in human cells.
0:00 / 0:29exact quote · 29.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And after Jennifer and Emmanuel discover how CRISPR can be engineered to be a tool to cut DNA, a race ensues to say who can make it work and show how it works in human cells first. And it takes them both six months along with some other labs. It's a race that Jennifer Doudna's team loses actually by two weeks. And Feng Zhang's team Gets the original, the first patents on it”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Walter Isaacson
Isaacson: Commercialized gene enhancements will encode societal inequalities into human biology
“What about allowing rich people to buy better memory for their kids, but since this technology is not going to be free, it'll encode the inequalities of our society into our species.”
Isaacson: Smart People Are Common and Usually Do Not Amount to Much
“Smart people are a dime a dozen, and they don't usually amount to much. The real key was being creative, to be able, as Steve Jobs would say, to think different and to be innovative”
Isaacson: Microsoft Teams signals a horrible, user-unfriendly experience
“You look at I don't know. Microsoft teams. It like says it imputes this is going to be a horrible experience. I'm not user friendly with you.”
Elizabeth Holmes told Isaacson she used his Steve Jobs biography as a how-to book
“In fact, when people would come up to me, and they'd say, I used your Steve Jobs book, like Elizabeth Holmes would, the person who invented Theranos launch Theranos. Say, oh, I use your Steve Jobs as a how-to book.”
Isaacson: Brutal intellectual honesty prevents teams from accumulating B players
“I know that being really brutal and intellectually honest is important. First of all, you motivate them, you drive them, you let them know where they're not performing and how they can, and you make sure that you don't have a team, as Steve Jobs said, that's f…”
Isaacson: Creative breakthroughs require dense face-to-face collaboration before dispersing
“If you want some bursts of creativity, it helps to have a lot of people actually interacting in real time, face to face, in an intimate fashion, and then you can disperse that creativity, whether it's a group that gets together and starts figuring out how to d…”