Jennifer Doudna

One of the problems in the biotech world is the lack of women in leadership roles, and I'd like to see that change by walking the walk.

As mechanistic biologists, we are hoping that by understanding how the virus works at the molecular level, we will be able to predict with more accuracy how it will evolve.

There's already a lot of active research going on using the Crispr technology to fix diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease. They're all diseases that have known genetic causes, and we now have the technology that can repair those mutations to provide, we hope, patients with a normal life.

The impression sometimes created among the public is that scientists are working away in their labs, and maybe they're not always thinking about the implications of their work. But we are.