designer babies

A discovery here. A paper there. An important paper gets passed over. A fortuitous encounter in a coffee shop among two ambitious scientists. A yogurt company just being a yogurt company. Science moves forward in fits and starts.

By the time we read the headline in the paper, “breakthrough of the year,” it can have an inevitable quality about it. Then, in a few years, the historian comes and shows us just how random, messy, and, yes, how beautiful is the business of science.

Kevin Davies, Executive Editor of the CRISPR Journal and author of several books on DNA, joins us for our final program of the year to talk about his latest opus, Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing. Prefacing it with his trip to the historic Hong Kong conference where He Jiankui made his infamous #CRISPRbabies presentation, Kevin is the first out with such a complete and entertaining chronicle of the CRISPR saga, its legendary characters, its taunting promises, and its daunting challenges.