Source: NCSU COLLEGE OF AG & LIFE SCIENCES, 7/30/18

Rodolphe Barrangou ’00 MS, ’04 Ph.D., felt out of place. There he was, his sleek 6-foot-2 frame tucked into a new tuxedo, mingling at an opulent hall at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Champagne was poured, awards were given, speeches were made. At one point, he found himself posing for pictures with Anthony Fauci, a renowned HIV/AIDS researcher. “It’s a fluke!” Barrangou recalls thinking at the time, no doubt struck with a bout of imposter syndrome. “I’m here with Tony Fauci! He’s saved millions of lives. What have I done?”

In actuality, his invitation to the 2016 Gairdner Awards Gala — where he was to receive one of biomedicine’s most prestigious prizes — had been set in motion many years earlier. Barrangou was working as a food scientist at DuPont in Madison, Wis., when he found odd stretches of repeated DNA sequences in the genomes of yogurt bacteria. These CRISPR repeats, as they were called, had turned up in other bacteria before, but nobody had been able to figure out why they were there. Barrangou performed a series of experiments to show that the repeats were part of an ancient defense system that enabled bacteria to recognize and chop up the DNA of invading viruses.

On its face, identifying the tactics that one microbe uses to annihilate another might not seem so earth-shattering. But scientists have since channeled this knowledge of CRISPR — which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats — into a tool that can edit the genome of any cell or species at will. As a result, the world as we know it may never be the same.

Scientists have already used CRISPR to engineer pigs to grow organs for people and correct a disease-causing mutation in human embryos. In the future, it has the potential to treat scores of diseases, increase food production and change the face of cancer research.

The term CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”) is so ubiquitous that it was added to the Oxford English dictionary last year, along with “power couple” and “dudettes.” It has fueled the collective imagination of the scientific world, all while creating a bitter power struggle over who deserves the glory—and the money—for technology that could rewrite the code of life.

“I know the story like, arguably, nobody else knows the story,” Barrangou says. “It’s what I call the gospel of CRISPR. I have witnessed first-hand some of the early CRISPR miracles.”

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