A Crack in Creation

Jennifer Doudna’s own account of CRISPR-Cas9, written with her former graduate student Samuel Sternberg: how a gene-editing tool came out of curiosity-driven research into bacterial immune systems, and what she started asking publicly once it was clear the thing worked — about germline editing, about whether a moratorium was possible, and about who gets to decide.

Why it’s on the list: It is one of four texts in Foundations of Science II, next to The Vaccine, Francis Collins’s The Language of God and Nick Lane’s Power, Sex, Suicide — a science survey taught out of first-person accounts by working scientists rather than out of textbooks, so the ethical argument arrives attached to the person who has to make it.

Where I saw it: Assigned in Foundations of Science II on the University of Austin’s Fall 2025 reading list — “65 Texts Our Students Are Reading”, 65 assigned texts across 12 courses, shared by @uaustinorg on November 13 2025 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”. The full curriculum is transcribed on UATX Fall Reading List.

Connections

• UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this was assigned in.
• The University of Austin — the institution whose course list this is.
• Gene Editing — the book’s subject.
• Biotech — the industry it created.
• Innovation
• Progress