Jennifer Doudna: I think many of us will, by then, because I think we’ll all be eating food and using crops and plants that will be genome edited. I think that we will be benefiting from medical breakthroughs that will have happened due to genome editing. Whether it’s an actual therapy or not, we’ll certainly benefit from the biomedical knowledge that’s coming from using this technology to understand the cause of disease, for example — and to really kind of start to get at this whole opportunity of personalized medicine that really comes down to, you know, every one of us is a little bit different, based on our DNA. And understanding that, at a molecular level, I think, is coming.
And then, I think, also, we didn’t talk about this, but benefiting from other applications of CRISPR, whether it’s controlling the spread of mosquito-borne disease, whether it’s making chemicals in research laboratories or in commercial settings that are made using bacteria or fungi instead of polluting chemical processes — I think that’s also coming with CRISPR, sort of “synthetic biology” is what we call it. So I think, within ten years, probably all of us will have many things that touch our lives that will come from CRISPR.