The Chemistry of Genome Editing: Transforming Human and Planet Health with CRISPR

I was born in Washington, DC, in 1964, the oldest of three sisters, but the place that truly formed me as a scientist was Hilo, on the Big Island of Hawaii. Growing up there, far from the mainland centers of power and prestige, I felt both isolated and free, surrounded by volcanic landscapes, lush forests, and the vast Pacific Ocean.My father, Martin, was a literature professor and a former speechwriter; my mother, Dorothy, taught history. Our house was full of books, but my imagination was captured as much by the natural world outside as by the stories on the shelves. I remember looking at the lava fields that shaped the Hawaiian Islands, learning the rich cultural history of the native peoples who first settled those lands, and wondering about the processes unfolding over millennia that we can glimpse only in small cross-sections of our lives. That sense of hidden processes, of invisible evolutionary forces shaping the visible world, would become a guiding thread in my scientific life. In school, I certainly did not see myself as a “born scientist.” In fact, as a girl in the 1970s, the assumption around me was that serious science was something men did somewhere else—on the mainland, in big labs, in institutions whose names I had only read about. But I had teachers who encouraged my curiosity, and parents who never questioned my interest in asking how things worked. One formative moment came when my father left a copy of James Watson’s The Double