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 Keynote Program
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.