David R. Liu

We obviously have gained the ability, the mastery, some would say, over RNA in the form of CRISPR.

And we've, for a number of years, had the ability to do recombinant DNA and DNA editing more broadly with more recent technologies like base editing that are helping quite helpfully, including from some folks like David Liu at Harvard, to cure genetic diseases.

every single step of the biology stack is now becoming editable and it basically as as friend of the pod ray kurzweil would say biology is turning into computer science and we have editors for every step the nanobots are are if not here they're

imminent i think back to the top of the show where saleem had just defended bitcoin alex why is he

And you also have the ability to think about gene therapy for dominant disorders.

And then, you know, obviously people like David Liu and others have gone on to design targeted guide RNA approaches to, you know, even more elegant ways to correct the genome with base editing or prime editing or epigenetic editing.

And this is another way you can get mutation correction.

Now, base editors need a bespoke editor for every mutation.

For families living with a genetic disease, a diagnosis can reveal exactly what has gone wrong in the DNA and still leave them without a treatment.

Dr. David Liu's work is helping change that.

His laboratory pioneered base editing and prime editing, technologies that allow scientists to change individual DNA letters and rewrite stretches of genetic code.

These tools opened up possibilities far beyond disrupting a gene.

How can these extraordinary advances reach the children who need them? Quickly, if you find these interviews helpful, please subscribe, like, and share.

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And now, Dr. David Liu.

What's your earliest memory of being passionate about genetics and science?

and without causing this break that CRISPR does.

Base editing is a precise gene editing technique developed in 2016 by David Liu, a professor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Base editing is already used in the medical environment.

In 2022, doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, in the UK, for instance, used it to save the life of Alyssa, a teenage girl with a very aggressive form of leukemia.

Where should we go from?

So the, so the other people on Clarivate's, uh, list for chemistry this year are, um, Harvard University's David Liu, um, who's a very well-known researcher.

Uh, he's done a lot of work on kind of gene-editing technologies.

Um, so specifically Clarivate were citing him for his work on base editing and prime editing, which are kind of very precise tools for editing genes, which obviously have applications in, like, medicine.