Kevin Davies | Executive Editor, The CRISPR Journal, & GEN Biotechnology and Author of The $1,000 Genome

Kevin Davies

Executive Editor, The CRISPR Journal, & GEN Biotechnology and Author of The $1,000 Genome

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Kevin Davies
Biography

Kevin Davies PhD is a scientific editor and author specializing in the medical and societal implications of breakthroughs in genetic technologies. 25 years after launching Nature Genetics, he created The CRISPR Journal, the first scientific journal devoted to gene editing (published by Mary Ann Liebert Inc.) He has also served as editor-in-chief of Cell Press and publisher of Chemical & Engineering News.

Kevin is the author or co-author of a clutch of popular science books including Cracking the Genome and The $1,000 Genome. He joined Jim Watson and Andrew Berry as a co-author of DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution. In 2017, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a new book on genome editing. The result is EDITING HUMANITY: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing, published in 2020 by Pegasus Books. Kevin is a regular commentator in the media on the medical and ethical implications of CRISPR Technology.

Kevin graduated with a degree in biochemistry from Oxford University and took his PhD in human genetics from St Mary's Hospital Medical School in London. After a pair of postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and Harvard Medical School, he hung up his lab coat for the last time, taking refuge as genetics editor for Nature magazine. Kevin lives in Washington DC.

Kevin Davies
Featured Videos

Current: Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing

Time 03:20

More Videos From Kevin Davies

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
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Genome Editing and the CRISPR Revolution

CRISPR is the revolutionary new technology that enables rapid, affordable and precise genome editing. After decades of progress in reading the sequence of DNA, researchers now have unprecedented ability to rewrite the genetic code of any organism. This technology has been celebrated in films, both fiction (Rampage) and non-fiction (Human Nature) and of course with the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Supported by a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, Kevin Davies is the author of the definitive book on the CRISPR saga: EDITING HUMANITY: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing, published in 2020 by Pegasus Books. As he did in his earlier books on the Human Genome Project and the consumer genetics revolution, Kevin takes the reader through the remarkable discovery of CRISPR and the key steps that turned it into a programmable "genetic scissors". He shows how this tool is already making headway in the clinic, essentially curing the first patients with sickle-cell disease.

But the technology also raises profound ethical issues about editing human embryos and the specter of designer babies. In November 2018, Kevin had a front-row seat for the bombshell announcement in Hong Kong that a Chinese scientist had created genetically edited babies for the first time, violating a sacred ethical red line. WIth dry British humor and effortless accessibility, Kevin brings to life the heroes of the CRISPR revolution, the rivalries, patent disputes, clinical applications, myriad applications in agriculture and de-extinction, and the ethical controversies. This story has extraordinary implications for medicine, science and humanity, and Davies is the ideal person to narrate it.

Kevin Davies
Featured Book

Editing Humanityby Kevin Davies

Editing Humanity

by Kevin Davies
One of the world's leading experts on genetics unravels one of the most important breakthroughs in modern science and medicine.

If our genes are, to a great extent, our destiny, then what would happen if mankind could engineer and alter the very essence of our DNA coding? Millions might be spared the devastating effects of hereditary disease or the challenges of disability, whether it was the pain of sickle-cell anemia to the ravages of Huntington's disease.

But this power to "play God" also raises major ethical questions and poses threats for potential misuse. For decades, these questions have lived exclusively in the realm of science fiction, but as Kevin Davies powerfully reveals in his new book, this is all about to change.

Engrossing and page-turning, Editing Humanity takes readers inside the fascinating world of a new gene editing technology called CRISPR, a high-powered genetic toolkit that enables scientists to not only engineer but to edit the DNA of any organism down to the individual building blocks of the genetic code.

Davies introduces readers to arguably the most profound scientific breakthrough of our time. He tracks the scientists on the front lines of its research to the patients whose powerful stories bring the narrative movingly to human scale.

Though the birth of the "CRISPR babies" in China made international news, there is much more to the story of CRISPR than headlines seemingly ripped from science fiction. In Editing Humanity, Davies sheds light on the implications that this new technology can have on our everyday lives and in the lives of generations to come.

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