Biochemist and UC Berkeley Professor Jennifer Doudna ’85 and her team discovered CRISPR-Cas9, a game-changing gene-editing technique with tremendous possibilities for curing diseases of all kinds, thanks to its precision. But with that finding, Doudna (who is also a Pomona trustee) discovered something else—that a great revelation sometimes brings with it a lot of wrestling. In A Crack in Creation, she tells a story that is about both success and struggle. PCM Book Editor Sneha Abraham talked to Doudna about the implications of what might be the most revolutionary scientific breakthrough of our time. This interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.

Jennifer Doudna ’85

PCM: You say in your book that, as a research scientist, you need adventurousness, curiosity, instinct, grit, practicality. Where do you get these traits from, and who’s your greatest influence?

Doudna: I think it comes from a combination of innate curiosity—I think we all have it, certainly as kids—and appropriate encouragement from family, friends and mentors along the way. That mix gave me an open-mindedness to ideas and a way of figuring out how to ask questions about the natural world.

PCM: Did your Pomona education prepare you for this in some way?

Doudna: I am grateful to Pomona every day, honestly, because it was a liberal arts education that exposed me to so many ideas that I would never have come into contact with, probably, without having attended Pomona. Many smart people, lots of really bright students, and not only those interested in chemistry, as I was, but also people thinking about history, French, physics, mathematics and geography. All sorts of topics. It’s a rich intellectual environment that opens one’s mind to the incredibly interesting diversity of the world in terms of cultures, ideas and perspectives.

PCM: Was there a class or professor that really impacted you while you were here?

Doudna: I think [Professor of Chemistry] Fred Grieman. I know he’s retiring soon, but Fred Grieman was a newish professor at the time when I attended Pomona. He was teaching physical chemistry, and he was spectacular. I think he’s a great combination of really deep understanding of the material so that you could teach it in a very clear and comprehensible way—and it’s not an easy topic, as you know—but also somebody who was very human, very funny, great sense of humor, really great at connecting with students. We used to play softball together in the summertime, and he always had students working in his lab over the summer and would have barbecues and things like that. He was very good at teaching us students that you could be a terrific scientist, very smart and intellectual, and still have a life outside of the lab.

PCM: In the book, you talk about that moment of discovery, that moment of pure joy in your kitchen. What was that like for you?

Doudna: Well, I’ve had a few, I would say, such moments in my career, and in this case, it was really one of those rare times in one’s life when the stars align. In our case, the ideas had come together, the data for experiments we were working on in the laboratory had given rise to a really sudden understanding of, not only how the CRISPR bacterial immune system works, but also how it could be used in a really exciting way. And that night, that moment I describe in the book, was really one of just unadulterated joy thinking about how amazing it is to explore science and make a discovery that you realize is going to be really impactful and change the world in certain ways.

PCM: That discovery presents so many amazing possibilities Was there an immediate thought that came to mind?

Doudna: For me, it was probably thinking about opportunities to cure genetic disease. When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, my lab was located at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where a professor named Jim Gusella was mapping the gene that causes Huntington’s disease. It is a terrible neurodegenerative disease that people get usually in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and then suffer from for many years with progressive loss of neurological function. So, being aware of that gene mapping experiment that was done in the ’80s, and then fast-forwarding a couple of decades and realizing that CRISPR technology, in principle, will allow the correction of that kind of mutation was a really profound thought.

PCM: You’re a research scientist, but with this discovery, you’ve become an ethicist as well, right? Were you expecting that as this was unfolding? How has that unfolding been for you?

Doudna: Not at all. I was absolutely not thinking, originally, about the kinds of ethical challenges that would come up. However, it became clear over the ensuing months that CRISPR was working better than anticipated, opening game-changing opportunities in how we might treat existing patients and how the technology might help future generations. What would be the ethical impact and what would go into making the right society and species-defining decisions needed to be explored and debated. I went from being a biochemist and structural biologist, working in my lab on this esoteric bacterial system, to realizing that I needed to get up to speed quickly on how other kinds of technologies that have been transformative had been managed and handled by the scientists that were involved in their genesis. Because the field of CRISPR was moving so quickly, the ethical discussions needed to catch up.

PCM: This is a big question. Is there an ethical dilemma that you’re most concerned about with genome editing?

Doudna: Well, there are a few that have gotten a lot of media attention. I think I would say that, at least in the near term, what I worry about the most is a rush to apply genome editing in ways that might inadvertently harm people. That might be because of over-excitement or the desire on the part of a scientist somewhere to do something first. I think that competitive want to move ahead with new ideas can be a very healthy drive in science but it can also lead to problems. In this case, I really hope that there is a concerted effort globally to restrain ourselves and do things in a measured and thoughtful fashion that doesn’t get ahead of the technology and the ethical debate.

PCM: It raises a lot of questions about us as a society, right? In the book you write about some of the implications socioeconomically and politically. How do you see this unfolding for the good? What are the dilemmas there?

Doudna: That’s another really big question. The good news is that there are now lots of discussions happening about the ethics and appropriate uses of gene editing technologies. I think that’s great progress but how we ultimately deploy CRISPR is going to come down to the pace at which helpful applications are actually developed and approved for use. For example, one of the most promising applications is called “gene drive.” It is the ability to drive a trait through a population very quickly using gene editing. Gene drive could be a real environmental impact concern due to its potential to wipe out a species of mosquitoes and perhaps cause unknown damage to associated species and ecosystems.

On the other hand, if deployed correctly, gene drive could have a hugely positive impact on human health by preventing the spread of mosquito-borne disease, perhaps by adding a trait that made mosquitoes incapable of transmitting a particular disease such as Zika virus. This is the type of cost-benefit calculation that has to be made in each case.

PCM: With CRISPR, when you’re looking ahead, or maybe it’s happening now, what kind of effects do you see on the biomedical industry or pharmaceutical companies, or the health care industry? Because this will change a lot of how we do medicine, right?

Doudna: I think it will in a few ways. One effect is using genome editing to discover genetic causes of disease. I think that’s still a very big data opportunity, to figure out, not only single genes that might cause disease, but also genetic interactions. Where there might be genes that interact with others to create a risk for certain people that bear that particular genetic makeup. I think that’s important, and it leads to opportunities to target those genes with drugs, and drug companies are increasingly using CRISPR technology to do exactly that. We are also trying to mine the human genome for new potential targets and then use genome editing to correct those mutations or create, if not a cure, at least some kind of a palliative approach to genetic disease. I think that will happen increasingly, especially as challenges like how to deliver these molecules into cells are addressed.

I also want to mention the incredible commercial opportunities. I’m seeing a lot of young entrepreneurs starting their own companies focused on making use of CRISPR technologies, investors excited to contribute money, and growing opportunities for companies to partner in different areas ranging from biomedicine to agriculture. It is very exciting and these opportunities are not just for scientists, but also for people that have a variety of backgrounds such as business. It’s really an interesting convergence of young people with a mix of expertise.

PCM: You write a bit about food politics, and the issue of GMOs, and that gap between the scientific community and the public. What do you think is driving the narrative that you say is false, that GMOs are a danger to our health? What’s behind that narrative that’s being pushed by other people?

Doudna: I think it’s a couple of things. Partly, it’s a lack of understanding about what we mean when we say “genetic modification,” and the fact that essentially all the food that we eat is genetically modified, because it’s edited by plant breeders that introduce genetic mutations. You just have to reference back to what tomatoes looked like before plant breeders got involved. They were very different from how they are today but why is that? Well, changes to the DNA, of course, but those changes were introduced, not by a precision genome editing technology like CRISPR. They were introduced by random mutation and then selection for desired traits. So, the unknown that can worry the public is what other genetic changes come along to the ride? We know they do but we just don’t happen to know what they are. I think when people understand that, they start to realize that the whole definition of GMOs is a bit contrived.

Also, I think the public can be suspicious about the intentions of corporations. That perception that corporations do not have our best health interests in mind, that they are out to make money, and that they do not care about potential risks, choosing instead to forge ahead with “Frankenfoods” or whatever you want to call it. We have seen this in the media, and it’s potentially at the expense of people’s health.

It really comes down to those two things then — not understanding what genetic modification really means and how our current food supply was created by plant breeders, and also being suspicious of the real motivations of corporations. We need to take a step back and really ask ourselves, “What makes sense here?” Then, we need to take a thoughtful path forward that allows technology to advance and help us solve important challenges in a way that is responsible. It’s not an easy balance, but I think we have to try to tackle that.

PCM: So who decides how this technology is used? You talk about that being a dilemma, as well, between scientists and the public. How is that dialogue going, currently, and how do you see that developing?

Doudna: Right now, the way that science progresses is largely decided by scientists, and then there are funders. So, if the scientists have an idea, something they want to do in the lab, they have to get money to do it. If they’re getting money from the public, namely from the taxpayers, that involves typically writing a grant, writing a proposal that says, “Here’s the science that I want to do, and here’s why,” and submitting it to a review committee of peers who review and comment on it. For example, they may say, “Well, good idea,” or, “Not a great idea,” and they then make a recommendation to the government about whether that type of science should be funded. That is how it currently works.

Now, if you’re a scientist who has other kinds of resources that are from private money—you have a wealthy donor or a foundation—you have to convince those folks rather than representatives of the government. Either way it usually comes down to an idea on the part of the scientist, and then convincing somebody or some entity to pay the bills. There’s a lot of science that involves things that could cause risk to humans. There are various kinds of regulatory controls that are placed on that work and various kinds of panels or review boards approve those kinds of projects. However, there’s not a broader oversight other than that, and a number of scientists have commented upon the fact that, for example, institutional review boards, or IRBs, have rules for how researchers can do things like work with human subjects or human tissues. The issue is that the rules are different at every institution.

Since the IRB rules at my institution, UC Berkeley, are different than other universities, I could have colleagues working elsewhere that would be under a different set of rules. That’s something that various groups are looking at—ways to try to streamline. As you can imagine, it’s very tough because you have a lot of different people with different opinions about these sorts of things. So, it’s just an ongoing challenge that we have.

PCM: This is half-joking, but I was chatting with a friend about CRISPR, and he asked, “At what point can we clone ourselves, get out of work, and still get paid?”

Doudna: Wow. That sounds very ambitious. It’ll take a lot of work to not have to work. That’s all I can say.

PCM: It’s not in the immediate future?

Doudna: No.

Of the many divisive cases in U.S. legal history, few are as haunting as Korematsu v. United States (1944). In the ruling, the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Hugo Black argued that national security took precedence over individual liberties. And they maintained the legality of the infamous Executive Order 9066—which ordered the incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.

This decision has remained a stain on civil liberties ever since, and the June 26, 2018, Supreme Court’s reversal of Korematsu represents the first major victory since 1988 related to rectifying Japanese-American incarceration. However, by overruling Korematsu while approving President Donald Trump’s travel ban, the court has simply appropriated one tragedy to justify another. While Chief Justice John Roberts argued that President Donald Trump’s travel ban is legally different—and constitutional—in comparison to the Korematsu case, they both have the purpose of unjustly singling out individuals based on race. And although the subject of Japanese- American incarceration focuses on racial injustice towards U.S. citizens, it is also a story of immigration and how the U.S. government has employed racialized immigration policies under the vague guise of “national security.”

Even before camps like Manzanar existed for holding U.S. citizens of Japanese descent against their will, the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service—the forerunner to ICE—had built their own camps to house Japanese citizens, often separating families in the process. Although Japanese immigrants had arrived in this country en masse since the 1870s, they were barred from naturalization. Long before U.S. involvement in World War II, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover drafted extensive lists of so-called “disloyal enemy aliens” because of vague associations with Japan. While Germans and Italians were on this list as well, they numbered far less and always had the option to become U.S. citizens; Japanese immigrants would not share that opportunity until 1952.

The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the FBI conducted mass arrests of Japanese-American community leaders—sometimes in the middle of the night—and detained them in internment camps across the U.S. from Montana to Louisiana. Families often heard very little from their relatives in these camps, where their detainment lasted anywhere from a few months to several years. By 1943, the U.S. began a policy of deporting Japanese-Americans back to Japan as part of an exchange program with U.S. prisoners of war. On July 14, 1945, less than two months before the war’s end, President Harry Truman signed into effect a proclamation that permitted immigration officials to remove internees from the United States if they were deemed “a danger to the public peace.”

One man who faced such a scenario was Katsuma Mukaeda.

In 1908, he immigrated from Japan to the United States. According to his 1995 obituary in the Los Angeles Times, he distinguished himself as a law student at USC and established himself as a successful lettuce grower in Southern California and a prominent figure in L.A.

Despite being unable to practice law because he was Japanese, he worked as a paralegal supporting the Japanese community. He was a champion for improving race relations within the greater Los Angeles community, and in 1935 helped establish the Society of Oriental Studies at The Claremont Colleges. According to scholar Malcolm Douglass, the society was founded with the intention of making the “Claremont Colleges the center of Oriental Culture on the Pacific Coast.” With help from a Rockefeller Grant, scholars at Pomona and Scripps worked alongside Mukaeda to established a strong emphasis on Asian Studies, and provided the foundation to the Asian Studies Library at Honnold-Mudd Library. To many, Mukaeda was an ideal U.S. citizen who advocated greater civic engagement and mending the issues of society.

Yet because of his activism, the FBI decided he was the perfect target. On Dec. 1, 1941, Hoover recommended Mukaeda’s internment “in the event of a national emergency.” Within a week after Pearl Harbor, FBI agents detained him with hundreds of other Japanese merchants, Buddhist priests and community leaders in the Los Angeles County Jail. Although no evidence of treason or sabotage was ever produced, Mukaeda was nonetheless interned for being “a suspect.” For years, he was shipped to various internment camps such as Camp Livingston, Louisiana, and Fort Missoula, Montana. By 1945, he found himself at Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico, where a large number of internees were subjected to abuse by guards and sometimes received poorer treatment than enemy POWs in stateside camps. Following Truman’s proclamation, Mukaeda also found himself facing deportation back to Japan.

All the while, his family was separated from him. While Mukaeda was sent to one internment camp after another, his wife, Minoli, and son, Richard, were incarcerated at Poston Incarceration Camp in Arizona. When Minoli received word of the July 1945 deportation list that included her husband, she pleaded to the U.S. government and others for help, arguing that their only son “needs a father’s care now more than anything.” While researching Mukaeda’s FBI file at the National Archives as a part of my graduate studies in June, I found dozens of letters of recommendation and support written to FBI officials, all testifying to his loyalty and future importance of mending relations between Japan and the U.S. The letter writers—mostly long-term residents of the Los Angeles area—ranged from close friends to L.A. Times publisher Harry Chandler and former Pomona College President James Blaisdell.

For President Emeritus Blaisdell, the story of incarceration was clear throughout Southern California. Shortly after the arrest of Mukaeda and the passage of Executive Order 9066, thousands of Japanese-Americans were herded into so-called “assembly centers” at the nearby Los Angeles County Fairgrounds and Santa Anita Racetrack. Three students from Pomona were also forced to leave campus due to the executive order, and were famously given tearful goodbyes by their fellow classmates. While the College itself did what many other universities did at the time—provide students with transfer options to East Coast schools—Blaisdell went further to help out his friend.

Throughout the years of Mukaeda’s internment, Blaisdell wrote multiple letters to the FBI reaffirming both the activist’s loyalty to the U.S. and his importance to the Los Angeles community based on his previous work with Pomona and Scripps, the only Claremont Colleges at that time. Blaisdell’s first letter of May 17, 1944, was sent to help secure Mukaeda a second hearing by the FBI. When the hearing did not clear his name, Mukaeda went back to Blaisdell for help. In a letter to the FBI in November 1945, Blaisdell praised Mukaeda as “a man, I believe, who can be of great usefulness in healing the relations between the two countries and establishing just and honorable relations between the Japanese and Americans in this country.” After a reappraisal of his case, Mukaeda was deemed loyal and freed from the Santa Fe camp in February 1946, after four years in detention separated from his family.

Following the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act in 1952, Japanese nationals were finally able to become United States citizens. A final attestation of their friendship was a letter from Blaisdell to Mukaeda dated June 3, 1953, congratulating him on becoming a citizen and proclaiming,“I only hope that we who have been native born will be worthy of you.” Mukaeda continued to be a champion for the Japanese-American community until his death on November 8, 1995 at the age of 104.

There are two important lessons from Mukaeda’s story. One is that foreign policy dictated by racism and the violent separation of families are both, sadly, a recent chapter in U.S. history. Immigrants of all backgrounds have participated in the building of our nation’s history, and a system focused on exclusion only harms ourselves.

When Mukaeda was being held captive by immigration officials and on the brink of being deported, there were Americans who stood up for him. Pomona’s mission as a college—while constantly evolving—has always focused, in part, on the importance of social justice and activism. Often we think of these stories as being driven by powerful figures that leave everyday people as mere spectators; in reality we all can play a role. Mukaeda’s story, and Blaisdell’s tireless support, remind us of our constant duty to support those victimized by unjust laws or systems such as our current immigration system—and of the ability we have to effect change.

Jonathan van Harmelen ’17 is a graduate student at Georgetown University studying the comparative history of incarceration.