Speaker 1: Hi, it's os Voloshin here. Welcome to tech Stuff. This week,
Speaker 1: we're taking a break from our usual Wednesday episode to
Speaker 1: share the first episode of an exciting new podcast from
Speaker 1: Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts called On Crisper, The Story of
Speaker 1: Jennifer Dowdner with Walter Isaacston. It's a five part series
Speaker 1: that tells the story of Dowdner, a Nobel Prize winning
Speaker 1: scientist who co created the revolutionary gene editing tool known
Speaker 1: as Crisper. From the first whispers of genetically edited babies
Speaker 1: in China to life saving treatments for rare diseases, On
Speaker 1: Crisper explores the promise, peril, and ethical dilemmas of a
Speaker 1: technology powerful enough to rewrite human destiny. The series traces
Speaker 1: the intense global competition, personal stakes, and moral questions that
Speaker 1: define the new frontier in synthetic biology, what Isaacson calls
Speaker 1: the third great revolution of modern times. I've loved listening
Speaker 1: to this show, and I hope you will as well.
Speaker 1: If you do enjoy this first episode, please make sure
Speaker 1: to find the rest of the series on your favorite
Speaker 1: podcast app and subscribe to get new episodes in your feed.
Speaker 1: Automatically every Tuesday. As for tech stuff, We'll see you
Speaker 1: on Friday for the Week in Tech.
Speaker 2: Last year, in Philadelphia, the mother and father of a
Speaker 2: baby boy experienced any newborn parents' nightmare. They discovered that
Speaker 2: their son, kJ had been born with a rare genetic
Speaker 2: disease called urea cycle disorder, causing him to have abnormally
Speaker 2: high levels of ammonia in his blood. The prognosis was devastating,
Speaker 2: and the only conventional life saving treatment option was a
Speaker 2: liver transplant, a treatment that kJ might not be able
Speaker 2: to obtain or survive. But then a pair of doctors
Speaker 2: at the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia approached Kj's family to
Speaker 2: discuss the possibility of trying a treatment that had never
Speaker 2: been tried before. They would try using a technology called
Speaker 2: Crisper to correct the specific genetic flaws that were creating
Speaker 2: Kj's condition.
Speaker 3: So it takes about six months and the doctors developed
Speaker 3: a drug that was designed to target baby Kj's genetic variant,
Speaker 3: specifically targeted to that one letter mess up in his DNA.
Speaker 3: In just a few days after his first injection, kJ
Speaker 3: starts showing signs of improvement. It's totally miraculous. The color
Speaker 3: returns to his cheeks, and for the first time he
Speaker 3: can tolerate protein in his diet. His parents are overwhelmed.
Speaker 3: After two months, the doctors described him as growing and
Speaker 3: thriving with no side effects from the treatment, and with
Speaker 3: every month the hope has grown that the world's first
Speaker 3: personalized gene editing treatment has been a complete success. Now
Speaker 3: you may think that therapy was developed over six months,
Speaker 3: but it was actually the product of like thirty years
Speaker 3: of biological research. I mean, there was a lot of
Speaker 3: technological development that went into this, and their race to
Speaker 3: arrive at this moment is just a great story of
Speaker 3: ambition and competition and collaboration and triumph because the work
Speaker 3: and the results are extraordinary, and much of it was
Speaker 3: fueled by the quiet determination of a biochemist named Jennifer Dowdner.
Speaker 3: And while that name may not be at the tip
Speaker 3: of your tongue like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or
Speaker 3: maybe Benjamin Franklin, her work might be the thing that
Speaker 3: saves your family like a different kJ or maybe it
Speaker 3: already did, like with the COVID vaccine.
Speaker 4: You know, we've never had in the past the ability
Speaker 4: to change the fundamental chemical nature of who we are
Speaker 4: in this way right and now we do and what
Speaker 4: do we do with that?
Speaker 3: The discovery is both a tale of pure curiosity driven
Speaker 3: basic science as well as functional science.
Speaker 2: This is the third time I've sat down with Isaacson
Speaker 2: as part of an ongoing conversation we're having about his subjects,
Speaker 2: the kind of people who changed the world by the
Speaker 2: force of their intellect. In the first season, we talked
Speaker 2: about Elon Musk and Isaacson's six hundred page biography of him,
Speaker 2: the tone that launched a thousand hot takes. In our
Speaker 2: second we focused on a less polarizing inventor, Benjamin Franklin,
Speaker 2: whose life in thinking helped us make sense of today's
Speaker 2: turbulent times. The origins of our third sit down traced
Speaker 2: back to twenty twelve, when the world first heard about
Speaker 2: a new gene editing tool called Crisper. A breakthrough that
Speaker 2: would allow us to modify our own genes, copying and
Speaker 2: pasting them like a sentence. ISAC's and when he learned
Speaker 2: the news, saw it as something more than a singular invention.
Speaker 2: To him, it represented, as he's written, the beginning of
Speaker 2: the third great Revolution of modern times, followed by the
Speaker 2: revolutions in physics and information technology.
Speaker 3: I was trying to create a pantheon of books about
Speaker 3: great geniuses and the scientific revolutions. They were creating Einstein,
Speaker 3: who brings us into the atomic era, of Steve Jobs,
Speaker 3: who brought us into the digital age, but also we're
Speaker 3: entering an age of a life sciences revolution, and I
Speaker 3: wanted to find somebody who represented this revolution. He was
Speaker 3: this brilliant, understated person, this woman who wasn't macurial or
Speaker 3: cantankerous like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, but was quietly
Speaker 3: leading a revolution. She wasn't just cloning sheep. She was
Speaker 3: pushing through technologies at are life changing. And I thought, hey,
Speaker 3: I need to spend time with her.
Speaker 2: I'm Evan rightlift. And this is on Crisper. The Story
Speaker 2: of Jennifer Dowdner, Episode one, Beginnings for Isaacson. The Tale
Speaker 2: of how Jennifer Dowdner delivered Crisper has its deepest roots
Speaker 2: in her childhood in Hilo, Hawaii.
Speaker 3: She's in Hawaii and she's looking at things like sleeping grass. Well,
Speaker 3: if you touch it, it curls up. I remember that.
Speaker 3: I remember touching farnes. They curl up, But I didn't
Speaker 3: sit there and obsess like, how does the leaf know
Speaker 3: how to do? It? Does have a motor inside, what
Speaker 3: causes it to move? And she became deeply curious about
Speaker 3: every little secret of nature, about the corals and about
Speaker 3: the curves of the shells and why they're done in
Speaker 3: a certain way. And I realized that was something other
Speaker 3: great innovator set is this passionate curiosity about everyday things.
Speaker 2: Walter says that around that time, Jennifer received a particular
Speaker 2: book from her father.
Speaker 3: Her father knew she loved to read, and used to
Speaker 3: buy used paperbacks on the way home and leave them
Speaker 3: on her bed for to read on Saturday. And one
Speaker 3: day he left the paperback of the Double Helix. And
Speaker 3: it looks like a detective book in a way. Now,
Speaker 3: if you know the Double Helix, it's a wonderful book.
Speaker 3: It's Jim Watson's personal account of how he and Francis
Speaker 3: Crick and others discovered the structure of DNA, that little
Speaker 3: double helix, and it's about their sprint to do it
Speaker 3: and to beat other researchers to make this discovery. But
Speaker 3: of course Jennifer didn't know that when she found the
Speaker 3: paperback on her bed, and she said, oh, I thought
Speaker 3: it was a detective's tale, and I saved it for
Speaker 3: a rainy Saturday. And when I started reading, I realized,
Speaker 3: what actually is a detective tale. It's about somebody on
Speaker 3: the hunt to try to figure out how do genetic
Speaker 3: information work. That seems like a pretty elevated thing, but
Speaker 3: the way that James Watson wrote that book, it made
Speaker 3: it feel like a detective story.
Speaker 2: When Dalna was reading The Double Helix as a kid,
Speaker 2: she was captivated not just by the discovery or even
Speaker 2: the detective's tale, Isaacson says, but by one character in particular.
Speaker 3: One of the interesting things about The Double Helix is
Speaker 3: there's a character in it named Rosalind Franklin, very to
Speaker 3: us in the science world, famous because she takes the
Speaker 3: photographs that allow Watson and Crick to figure out the
Speaker 3: double helix structure of DNA, and she doesn't get much credit.
Speaker 3: And in the book that Watson writes, he dismisses her
Speaker 3: a bit. He calls her Rosie, even though he takes
Speaker 3: her science serious. And I asked Jennifer about that. When
Speaker 3: she read the book, did she notice the dismissiveness? She said, no,
Speaker 3: because I was so surprised that a girl could be
Speaker 3: a scientist. And that's what I took away from the
Speaker 3: book was I did not know women were scientists.
Speaker 2: So she didn't find early in her life role models.
Speaker 3: She said she had two role models. One was Rossall
Speaker 3: and Franklin in this book, and the other she read
Speaker 3: a childhood book about Marie Curie. And she had always
Speaker 3: wanted to be a French teacher, and she was doing
Speaker 3: literature even in high school. And so she told her
Speaker 3: guidance counselor at school, I think I want to be
Speaker 3: a scientist. And the guidance counselor in Ilo, Hawaii said, no,
Speaker 3: girls don't do science. Well, it was a good thing
Speaker 3: that he said that, because if you know Jennifer and
Speaker 3: you read the book, that's going to get her back up.
Speaker 3: And it does, and she says, then I'm going to
Speaker 3: become a scientist. She was very lucky to have a mentor.
Speaker 3: There was a guy named Don Hemis who taught biology
Speaker 3: at the local college in Helo of Hawaii, and he
Speaker 3: would go and walks on the beach with her and
Speaker 3: collect small organisms and show the crustaceans and how they worked,
Speaker 3: and allowed her to indulge her interests in science, and
Speaker 3: even in the summer, would bring her into the lab
Speaker 3: where she could look at the shells under a microscope.
Speaker 3: And we have to realize the importance of mentorship and
Speaker 3: also realize that sometimes science is not something that everybody
Speaker 3: gets to be a part of. There's a lot of
Speaker 3: underrepresented groups in science, including women.
Speaker 2: And it seems like she once she got to college,
Speaker 2: she did start to you know, she had a real
Speaker 2: aptitude for science, but even then she almost was a
Speaker 2: French wanted to become an expert in French literature instead.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she goes to Pomona, which has a great chemistry
Speaker 3: department and a smaller college in California. She's really out
Speaker 3: of place because you know, she's from Hawaii and I
Speaker 3: don't know anybody, and she's finding the chemistry hard because
Speaker 3: she didn't know enough math. And she tells her French
Speaker 3: teacher at college, I think I'm going to change majors
Speaker 3: to French. I've always wanted to be a French major.
Speaker 3: And fortunately the French professor says something. She says, you know,
Speaker 3: if you become a French major, that's great, and you
Speaker 3: may become a French professor. But if you become a
Speaker 3: biology major, there's probably more open to you.
Speaker 2: It's true, it's true. The job prospects are significantly different.
Speaker 2: So then she ends up at Harvard, she ends up
Speaker 2: in Jack Shostak's lab. And this seems like another sort
Speaker 2: of pivotal moment in the sense that he conveys to
Speaker 2: her something about doing basic science and why you're doing
Speaker 2: it and what you're trying to capture.
Speaker 3: Two things. He conveys the importance of basic science. In
Speaker 3: other words, you're not supposed to be just trying to
Speaker 3: invent a new microchip or invent a gene editing tool.
Speaker 3: You're supposed to be marveling at the basic beauty of nature.
Speaker 3: And secondly, he said, ask the big questions, and she said,
Speaker 3: what's the big question? And he says, the origin of life?
Speaker 3: How did it happen? And that's when they start looking
Speaker 3: at RNA, a molecule that's not as famous as its
Speaker 3: sibling DNA.
Speaker 2: And in the book, you take us through some of
Speaker 2: the history of how these discoveries were made, and we
Speaker 2: don't have to go through the whole history of it.
Speaker 2: But you know, Darwin to Gregor Mendel oh, let's we
Speaker 2: certainly can.
Speaker 3: Well, you gotta start with Darwin and Mendel, both in
Speaker 3: the same periods on the mid eighteen hundreds. And what
Speaker 3: Darwin figures out by going on the voyage of the beagles,
Speaker 3: of the galopgos and others is different species adapt as
Speaker 3: their environment changes. He looks at the beaks of the
Speaker 3: finches and like, oh, maybe they had a drought and
Speaker 3: a beak become something that can open up nuts. So
Speaker 3: he's trying to figure out how does this information, this
Speaker 3: survival of the fittest lead to changes in the genetic information.
Speaker 3: And at the same time, unbeknownst to him, there's a
Speaker 3: priest in Burno, which is the Czech Republic now, who
Speaker 3: is breeding peas, and he would say, okay, I like
Speaker 3: the peas with the purple coat, and when I mix
Speaker 3: them with the peas with the white coat, they don't
Speaker 3: sort of blend purple and white. They'll have a dominant
Speaker 3: gene so most turnout purple, but one will turn out
Speaker 3: white in the second generation. So all of that information
Speaker 3: comes together and they finally discover around nineteen hundred there
Speaker 3: just must be some chemical in our body that transmits
Speaker 3: this genetic information, and that's where the hunt begins for
Speaker 3: how does genetic information get transmitted.
Speaker 2: Coming up after the break we dive into the Human
Speaker 2: Genome project and why some scientists, notably women, didn't get
Speaker 2: the chance to work on it.
Speaker 3: The big breakthrough around nineteen fifty or so is when
Speaker 3: James Watson and Francis Kraik get together in Cambridge University,
Speaker 3: England and they figure out the DNS structure, which is
Speaker 3: it has two strands and it's like a spiral staircase,
Speaker 3: and the rungs are four different letters. We'll call out
Speaker 3: for chemicals ATCG and it can pull itself. It pulls
Speaker 3: upon and replicates itself, and those letters three billion pairs
Speaker 3: of code to code you and me that encodes the
Speaker 3: genetic information that gets transferred generation to generation.
Speaker 2: This string of findings from Darwin to Watson and Crick
Speaker 2: with a foundation for the study of DNA. But fast
Speaker 2: forward two decades later and Jennifer DOWDNA and our mentor
Speaker 2: at Harvard doctor Jack Showsteck. We're paying attention to another
Speaker 2: important but more neglected molecule, RNA.
Speaker 3: The different molecules we have in our body, proteins being
Speaker 3: among the most famous, but there's also what they're called
Speaker 3: nucleic acids, and they're two of them, RNA and DNA.
Speaker 3: And DNA is what encodes our heredity, our genes. They
Speaker 3: are encoded in this four letter code that can replicate
Speaker 3: itself because the strands of DNA can pull apart and
Speaker 3: then create an identical new set of DNA strands. That's
Speaker 3: how we transmit genetic information. But the real question is
Speaker 3: what makes that work, and that's what RNA does. It's
Speaker 3: not as famous, but like a lot of not famous siblings,
Speaker 3: it actually does more work because the DNA just sits
Speaker 3: there in the nucleus of your cell, curating this information.
Speaker 3: It can't go anywhere. He carefully guards it. But RNA
Speaker 3: goes into the nucleus, reads that blueprint, reads that information
Speaker 3: in the DNA code, and then goes to the outer
Speaker 3: area of the cell where proteins are made, and it
Speaker 3: will make a protein based on the information it got
Speaker 3: from DNA. And that's all life is is proteins getting made.
Speaker 3: Whether it's your fingernails, your hair, or the neurons in
Speaker 3: your brain or the muscles that twitch, those are just
Speaker 3: different forms of protein that use the code in our genes,
Speaker 3: and it's RNA that said, all right, we're now going
Speaker 3: to build a molecule that's a hair follicle.
Speaker 2: In that lab, Dauna and her colleagues were focused squarely
Speaker 2: on RNA.
Speaker 3: DNA knows how to replicate itself, that's its strong sort.
Speaker 3: That's why it's DNA. Rna they figured out could also
Speaker 3: replicate itself and help create proteins, and so it could
Speaker 3: have been the original molecule that gets life started. And
Speaker 3: indeed they do a paper about self replicating RNA and
Speaker 3: set the groundwork for which it's now called the RNA world,
Speaker 3: which is how did life begin? Well, there was this
Speaker 3: stew of a lot of chemicals and four of them
Speaker 3: get together and they start replicating. And it made her
Speaker 3: always want to look at basic science and the big
Speaker 3: questions of life.
Speaker 2: Is that the paper that landed her at Cold Spring
Speaker 2: giving the talk at age twenty.
Speaker 3: Three, absolutely the research with Jack shaw Stack into the
Speaker 3: RNA world and how you could have RNA replicate itself
Speaker 3: and do all these amazing things. That she gets invited
Speaker 3: by the great James Watson, whose Double Helix she had
Speaker 3: read as a kid, to come to cold Spring Harbor
Speaker 3: lab on Long Island where they have scientific conferences because
Speaker 3: Jack shaw Stack couldn't come, and so she gets to
Speaker 3: present their work with James Watson sitting in the front row,
Speaker 3: and this is a seminal experience for her.
Speaker 2: Isaacson tells me that for DOWDNA, the Cold Spring Harbor
Speaker 2: conference was not just a full circle moment, but a
Speaker 2: signal that she was joining this historical chain of discovery,
Speaker 2: a generational project aimed at ultimately unraveling how our genes work.
Speaker 2: But down it wasn't alone. There was an expanding group
Speaker 2: of researchers who were turning their attention to RNA. It
Speaker 2: feels like when DAWDNA is sort of starting to come
Speaker 2: of age as a scientist's you know, she's working in
Speaker 2: different labs. There's this next big development going on, which
Speaker 2: is the Human Genome Project, and that's sort of what's
Speaker 2: hovering over everything. But she goes in a different direction,
Speaker 2: and maybe you can explain what the Human Genome Project
Speaker 2: was doing and why she kind of went the other way.
Speaker 3: So in the nineteen fifties, when Watching and Krick discover
Speaker 3: the structure of DNA, the hunt becomes let's look at
Speaker 3: each of those letters and decode where in our DNA
Speaker 3: it codes for hair height, whatever may be encoded for.
Speaker 3: And that was called the Human Genome Project, which is
Speaker 3: map the human gene and one of the leaders was
Speaker 3: James Watson, and Francis Crick was very involved too. It
Speaker 3: culminated in the year two thousand, more.
Speaker 5: Than a thousand of searches across six nations have revealed
Speaker 5: nearly all three billion letters of our miraculous genetic code.
Speaker 5: I congratulate all of you on the stunning and humbling achievement.
Speaker 3: I was at Time magazine and we put Francis Collins
Speaker 3: and Craig Ventnor on the cover. They were rivals trying
Speaker 3: to decode the gene. We were going to just do
Speaker 3: Craig Venter. And the little thing was that the vice
Speaker 3: president was Al Gore, and he was insistent. He even
Speaker 3: called and said, you also have to put the National
Speaker 3: Institutes of Health person, the government person. Yeah, he called
Speaker 3: and said, you can't just put this privateer who's doing it.
Speaker 3: And so we put them both on the cover and
Speaker 3: we thought it was the biggest thing in the world
Speaker 3: that all of human life would now change, because we
Speaker 3: could read the blueprint of the discovery of our human genome.
Speaker 3: It was a big deal back then. Then Dolly the
Speaker 3: Sheep was being cloned, and everybody thought that DNA was
Speaker 3: going to be a revolution, And like a lot of revolutions,
Speaker 3: it actually started slowly. Why because we could now read
Speaker 3: the code of life, but we couldn't do anything with it.
Speaker 3: You couldn't rewrite it, you couldn't edit it.
Speaker 2: But there was this sense then that well, now we
Speaker 2: have command of this thing.
Speaker 3: We know.
Speaker 2: Now, we'll just figure out what all the genes do,
Speaker 2: and then we'll be able to manipulate them. Down the line,
Speaker 2: we'll be able to cure diseases. But everyone was forgetting
Speaker 2: about another element, which was RNA.
Speaker 3: It was quite nice to be able to say, oh,
Speaker 3: that's the part of the gene that does this, but
Speaker 3: let's say it's the letter in the gene that's messed
Speaker 3: up that causes sickle cell anemia. That was fine to know,
Speaker 3: but there wasn't much useful that came out of it,
Speaker 3: And that's when RNA and the women who were focusing
Speaker 3: on RNA entered the story. One of the things that
Speaker 3: happened is the Human Genome Project and decoding DNA is
Speaker 3: mainly an alpha male exercise. Jennifer Dowden, when she played
Speaker 3: soccer as a little kid in Hawaii, she said, all
Speaker 3: the boys used to run to the ball, but I
Speaker 3: always wanted to run to where the ball was going
Speaker 3: to be. And so a lot of women who were
Speaker 3: not part of the Human Genome Project started studying RNA,
Speaker 3: the less famous molecule, and those were people like Jillian Vanfield,
Speaker 3: Emmanuel Scharpanche, Kati Carichko, and of course Jennifer DOWDNA. In
Speaker 3: the end, it turns out that RNA is a lot
Speaker 3: more useful to understand because it's the one that goes
Speaker 3: and does work, reads the DNA, and then has the
Speaker 3: protein made. It also can be a messenger to make
Speaker 3: any protein you want, which is quite useful when you're
Speaker 3: trying to invent a COVID vaccine and you want to
Speaker 3: make a fake spike protein in people's cells. So a
Speaker 3: lot of women were doing RNA, and after the Human
Speaker 3: Genome Project, it became important to say, well, what are
Speaker 3: we going to do with all this information. We have
Speaker 3: to be able to manipulate it, we have to edit it,
Speaker 3: we have to do things with it. And that's where
Speaker 3: RNA becomes the tool just like in our body. It's
Speaker 3: a tool for applying the code of DNA to the
Speaker 3: making of protein. In science and the basic research, it
Speaker 3: becomes the tool for understanding what we can do with
Speaker 3: our genetic coding.
Speaker 2: Isaacson says that in order to really understand how to
Speaker 2: harness the abilities of RNA, Jennifer Downer realized that she
Speaker 2: had to use some of the same techniques deployed by
Speaker 2: Roslin Franklin to uncover the structure of DNA, namely an
Speaker 2: imaging technology called X ray crystallography, which, as Isaacson writes,
Speaker 2: she could use to figure out the folds and twists
Speaker 2: of the three dimensional structure of self splicing RNA.
Speaker 3: She had understand stood from Jack show Stack the important
Speaker 3: of RNA in how RNA explained the origins of life.
Speaker 3: So she's doing things about the structure of RNA, trying
Speaker 3: to crystallize that. That's the way scientists are able to
Speaker 3: figure out what does it really look like? You know,
Speaker 3: how can I shine light into it? It is what
Speaker 3: Rosalind Franklin did for DNA, so that we can see
Speaker 3: the structure in the shape mm hmm.
Speaker 2: And it seems like Jennifer downas she really she had
Speaker 2: that maybe that soccer player moving to where the ball
Speaker 2: is going to be sense of there's something here that
Speaker 2: we're going to need to know, and there's basic science
Speaker 2: to be done here. And I feel like her first
Speaker 2: the first time she sort of has a public profile,
Speaker 2: is like a little story that you found when she's
Speaker 2: at Yale. She's working on the structure of RNA and
Speaker 2: there's a very moving scene where she's trying to resolve
Speaker 2: this question and her father is dying at the same time, her.
Speaker 3: Father was dying, and her father it was this great influence.
Speaker 3: It always pushed her to be a scientist, and he
Speaker 3: kept saying, even though he was fighting cancer, kept saying,
Speaker 3: explain it to me, Explain what you're doing. And that
Speaker 3: becomes one of Jennifer Dowden's superpowers is being able to
Speaker 3: explain what was happening.
Speaker 2: What she explained to her father was her first taste
Speaker 2: of real scientific discovery, a picture of the three dimensional
Speaker 2: folded shape of an RNA molecule. But for DOWDNA and
Speaker 2: her expanding orbit of colleagues, kneeling the structure of RNA
Speaker 2: was just the beginning to figure out how to harness
Speaker 2: that structure. She would need to piggyback on an obscure
Speaker 2: breakthrough from across the ocean in Spain.
Speaker 3: A graduate student, young scientist in Spain, and he's looking
Speaker 3: at bacteria in very, very salty ponds and he notices
Speaker 3: something when he's sequencing the genes, and he keeps seeing
Speaker 3: these pedit sequences, but nobody knows why they exist, and
Speaker 3: that's when the hunt begins.
Speaker 2: Coming out this season on chrispur.
Speaker 3: There's a race around the world. It's dangerous because scientists
Speaker 3: are sometimes competitive. They want to get their paper published first.
Speaker 3: They want to win the prize, they want to get
Speaker 3: the patent. Not only will we be able to cut,
Speaker 3: DNA will cut and paste just as if we were
Speaker 3: using a word processor. Jennifer had a nightmare and it
Speaker 3: was that somebody wanted to meet with her about this
Speaker 3: new technology. And she opens the door to the room.
Speaker 3: The person looks up and it's Adolph Hitler, and she's
Speaker 3: taken aback and she realizes, of course, that in the
Speaker 3: wrong hands, this tool could be not just powerful, but evil.
Speaker 2: On Crisper, the Story of Jennifer DOWDNA is a production
Speaker 2: of Kaleidoscope and iHeart. This show is based on the
Speaker 2: writing and reporting of Walter Isaacson. It's hosted by me
Speaker 2: Evan Ratliffe and produced by Adrianna Tapia with assistance from
Speaker 2: Alex Zonoveld. It was mixed by Kyle Murdoch and our
Speaker 2: studio engineer was Thomas Walsh. Our executive producers are Kate
Speaker 2: Osbourne and Mangashatigador from Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell from iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2: If you enjoy hearing stories about visionaries and science technology,
Speaker 2: check out our other seasons based on the biographies that
Speaker 2: Walter Aakson's written. On Musk for an intimate dive into
Speaker 2: all the facets of Elon Musk and on Benjamin Franklin
Speaker 2: to understand how his scientific curiosity shapes society as we
Speaker 2: know it. Thanks for listening.