#What to do if You’re Working in a Mine and You Accidentally Uncover an Ancient Evil

[thatsbelievable]

[angelofrainfrogs]

Mirror, Mirror

Fandom: (Crossover) Lockwood and Co. and The Bartimaeus Trilogy

Pairing: None

Description: One night during an investigation, Lockwood and Co. come across a suspicious mirror. However, the Agents soon discover something much stranger: the mirror is a portal, and on the other side of that portal is a young Egyptian boy with piercing golden eyes.

Rating: K+

Genre: Mystery/Humor

Read on Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15990740

"What is that thing?"

"Dunno, Luce." Lockwood flashed a grin. "Looks like a portal of some kind."

"It makes me uneasy..."

"Oh, come on! It's interesting!"

"'Extremely sketchy' is the term I would use." This was George, who paused to wipe his glasses on his shirt before focusing again on the strange, ethereal hole in front of us.

We were on yet another paranormal case, investing yet another supposedly haunted building. The owner had bought the property but wanted to clear the area of any wayward Visitors before he tore the original house down and replaced it with a swanky hotel. So far, two hours into the investigation, we'd encountered some loose floorboards, a jammed door that nearly broke George's already squashed-looking nose upon being opened, and a general feeling of unease. Though we hadn’t come upon any actual Visitors, that certainly didn't mean they weren't present. The fact that we had just stumbled upon a plethora of spiders suggested quite the contrary, in fact. However, all we had uncovered so far was a strange, unnaturally dark mirror that, when accidentally jabbed with the tip of my rapier as I turned to leave the room, began to emit an ominous hum and project an image of the entryway to the house upon its surface.

This is what we were all staring at with rapt interest. Lockwood's grin widened.

"I say we go through it!" he exclaimed, gesturing to the mirror. I raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

"We don't even know what this really is," I pointed out. Lockwood let out a small chuckle.

"And we won't know until we investigate, will we? Maybe this thing leads to the Source!" Gently, he reached out towards the surface of the mirror. To George and my surprise, his pointer finger slipped right through it, as if the surface was made of water.

"Lockwood, I don't think that's wise-"

"Come on! It probably has a false back and was designed to look like a solid object. I can only sense a vague energy coming through it, anyway; certainly nothing to be concerned about." He cut me off with another grin, much to my dislike. I narrowed my eyes.

"You should know by now that Lockwood isn't famous for his wise decisions," George commented, causing me to train my glare upon him. He shrugged and pulled a cookie from the god-knows-how-deep recesses of his pocket. He took a huge bite and continued in the midst of chewing, gesticulating wildly with the cookie in hand. "If he wants to investigate something, he's going to do it. Besides, his leg's already halfway through."

"What?!" With a start, I whirled around to find George's statement somewhat true: Lockwood had indeed stepped into the portal, but at this point his entire leg was consumed by the rippling surface. He turned to me and jumped through with a wink, rapier held in front of him to ward off any unwanted things that might be waiting to greet him on the other side.

"I don't believe this...," I muttered, taking out my rapier as well. I was about to step through the surface when I realized that George hadn't moved. He seemed particularly transfixed by a brick at his feet; obviously, he had even less of a desire to jump through the mirror as I did. Still, that didn't mean he got a free pass.

With a resigned sigh, I grasped George's shirtsleeve and gave a forceful tug, plunging us both into the strange, water-like surface of the mirror.

***

We emerged in the entryway of the house. Everything seemed just the same as when we originally entered a few hours ago, save for the fact that we took a nonsensical shortcut to get there. Lockwood stood at the bottom of the grand staircase, rapier still in hand but no longer held out in front of him.

"What were you thinking?!" I began, marching up to him. I still had George by the sleeve, a fact which I quickly remedied by letting go with a light shove.

"You made me drop my cookie!" George exclaimed indignantly, righting himself and brandishing his empty hand towards me.

"I'm sure there's a whole candy store in those pockets of yours," I snapped back, not in the mood to listen to his whining. He replied with some sarcastic retort but I ignored this, continuing my walk until I planted myself right in Lockwood's view. I placed my hands on my hips and stared straight into his face. "Anyway, that was the stupidest decision! Why would you just go through like that?! For all we knew, it could've closed on you and... well, I'd hate to think of the ramifications of that!"

I shivered at the thought, and then quickly turned to the portal- or, where it should have been. There was no mirror in sight- an odd thing, since we'd just walked through it-, but I assumed it was resting against the wall just around the corner where we had found it in the first place. Still, I'd made a valid point; what if it could close, and more importantly, what if it already was closing? I opened my mouth to voice this concern, but Lockwood held up a hand.

"Hold on, Lucy," he said, softly. I wanted to give him another piece of my mind for putting a hand in my face to quiet me, but I could tell that he was serious. He sensed something. His eyes met mine for a brief moment and he asked, even softer, "Listen; do you hear anything?"

I opened all of my senses then- outer and inner. Sure enough, there was a dull noise, like faint whispering. It seemed to be coming from somewhere upstairs. We all turned towards the staircase- even George, whose senses weren't nearly as good as ours, knew that something was amiss. He and I quickly held out our rapiers as well, matching Lockwood's readied stance.

Suddenly, a small shape darted out of a room at the top of the stairs. We all tried to focus on it, but the thing disappeared almost as soon as it appeared. That tiny shape wasn't the most intriguing being in the house, however.

To our surprise and extreme confusion, a boy emerged from the room as well.

Though it was hard to tell from this distance, he appeared to be a little younger than me. His dark skin and jet-black hair countered his bright, golden eyes, visible to us even in the dim moonlight shining through the window atop the grand staircase. He wore nothing but a white skirt-like garment- the type of thing you would most likely picture the ancient Egyptians wearing. This was especially surprising due to the fact that it was a whopping 49 degrees in the house and dropping steadily.

"...Who in the blue blazes is that fool?!" George muttered, to an immediate chorus of shushes from Lockwood and me. The boy certainly looked foolish, I had to admit- and apparently normal, for that matter, especially if George could see him with no trouble at all. However, something about him unnerved me. I could sense a vague outline surrounding him, but as usual, my Sight was less than fantastic.

The boy turned to us when he heard George speak, and the whispering suddenly got louder. It was strange; usually, the whispers I hear either come from one distinct voice or, more commonly, a plethora of lost souls all vying to talk to me at once. This time, however, the voice definitely originated from one place. It sounded almost as if this same voice was layered on top if itself, like the one voice contained a second, constant stream of thought separate from its main dialogue, but still running at the same time.

...It's rather hard to explain, in all honesty.

"Hey!" the boy suddenly shouted from atop the staircase, breaking my concentration. Instinctively, I raised the rapier higher in front of me as the boy descended the steps. As he came closer, I got a good look at his expression.

"Well, he seems rather miffed," George commented, putting his rapier back onto his belt. Obviously, his sense of danger had passed, for he began rooting around in his pocket for another treat. I remained on my guard.

"Hello!" Lockwood said cheerily, lowering his own rapier as the boy approached. I noticed that he did not, however, put it back onto his belt. Maybe he saw something that I couldn't. "We're sorry, we didn't realize that anyone else was here!"

The boy came to a halt in front of us, arms crossed and one eyebrow raised. Getting a closer look at his face, I saw thick, black outlines of make-up around his eerily golden eyes. He really looked as though he'd stepped out of a picture of an ancient Egyptian child, though he definitely didn't carry himself like one. The air around him was thick with a foreboding sense that there was quite a lot more to this boy than he let on.

"Neither did I," he responded curtly, eyeing us one at a time before finally settling back on Lockwood. "In fact, there wasn't supposed to be anyone else here... Please tell me you're just some crazy kids who dared each other to explore a creepy old house and not some secret agents I should be worried about..."

The term "agent" made my hand twitch in surprise, though thankfully I kept the rest of my composure in check. For some reason, I wasn't sure the boy would recognize us for what we were so easily.

"...We were just exploring the house," Lockwood responded, effectively side-stepping the boy's accusation. I glanced over and could see him squinting, as if he desperately wanted to put on his sunglasses. His Sight was obviously working at full capacity.

So was my Hearing, now that I focused even more. The whispering sounded much louder than before, like the Source was right in front of me. I looked back at the boy curiously.

“What in the world are you doing here?” George asked, his eyebrows creasing unfavorably. Lockwood, in turn, began rummaging around in his coat until he pulled out a pair of dark sunglasses. I frowned as well, mirroring George’s expression; it seemed that whatever Other-light that Lockwood could detect had finally become too much for the naked eye.

“I should ask the same,” the boy responded, crossing his arms and jutting out a hip in a manner inherent of someone with a serious attitude problem. His deep gaze swiveled between the three of us and when he focused on me, the overlay of a faint voice swelled and made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

“Well… we’re investigating,” Lockwood spoke up, an easy smile stretching his lips upward. Almost hesitantly, he placed his rapier back in his belt. “This building is very, very haunted, you see, and we’ve been called upon to sort it out. I’m Anthony Lockwood, leader of Lockwood and Company, and these are my associates, Lucy and George.”

Lockwood thrust out his hand. The boy stared at the proffered limb for a moment, then slowly uncrossed his arms and gave Lockwood’s hand a light shake.

“Bartimaeus,” the boy responded with a smile, pearly-white teeth gleaming in the dim lamplight. George let out a noise that seemed a cross between disbelief and mild offence, but otherwise said nothing intelligible.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Lockwood released Bartimaeus’ hand and cast his gaze around the atrium. “By any chance… are you a free-lancing Agent working the case as well?”

I had assumed the same. It was much more likely that this boy was an independent Agent as opposed to someone randomly wandering around a spooky house in the dead of night with absolutely no protection against wayward spirits. However, to our surprise Bartimaeus merely raised a curious eyebrow.

“What in the world are you on about?” he questioned. Lockwood opened his mouth to respond, but then closed it again with an equally curious expression, scanning his gaze around the boy’s figure. Bartimaeus let out a laugh and shook his head. “Don’t worry your dull minds about what I am.”

“Excuse you,” I spoke up, hands planted firmly on my hips. “There’s no need for insults!”

“Yeah!” George said, and I was astounded that he was actually backing me up for a change. “Call Lockwood whatever you'd like, but only we’reallowed to insult Lucy!”

“Hey!”

“George, Lucy, please.” Lockwood held up a hand and I managed to bite my tongue before spouting off an even ruder comeback. There was an awkward silence, in which we all studied each other with equal hints of wariness and uncertainty. Finally, Bartimaeus spoke up.

“…As charming as you all are, I have my own tasks to attend to that I’m certain have absolutely nothing to do with you, so-” Bartimaeus cut himself off, realizing that Lockwood had suddenly frozen in place and was staring slack-jawed at a spot a few feet higher than his head. A sly smile spread across Bartimaeus’ face. “…See something interesting, Anthony?”

Instantly, I worried that Lockwood would have an adverse reaction to the use of his first name. However, by the expression on his face, that seemed to be the least of his concerns. His breathing was shallow and his wide eyes caused George to give my arm a concerned tug.

“What’s wrong with him?” George asked, and I shook my head.

“No idea- Lockwood?” Gently, I shook Lockwood’s arm. He jumped so violently at my touch, rapier suddenly in his hand, that I swear I almost lost a finger. “AH! Lockwood, it’s me!”

“Wha- oh! Luce, I’m so sorry!” Quickly, Lockwood hooked the weapon back in his belt. Then, in a change of mood so abrupt that George and I suffered mild whiplash, Lockwood grinned and turned back to Bartimaeus.

“Fantastic to meet you,” he said, including his head towards the boy in the loincloth. I surreptitiously checked my temperature gauge; it was now thirty-eight degrees. I shivered and pulled my cloak tighter around myself. Gaze still trained on Bartimaeus, Lockwood started backing towards the hallway containing the mirror-portal, grasping George and my hands along the way. “But we really must be going; lots of Sources to find and Visitors to subdue, haha!”

“Lockwood-” George began, but his protestation was cut off by a forceful tug on his hand that caused him to stumble and put all his attention towards remaining upright. I could not see the expression in Lockwood’s eyes, but I knew that it must be intense.

Lockwood never backed down; something about this situation had to be very, very wrong.

As Lockwood continued to drag George and I away from the strangely-silent Bartimaeus, I made a last-ditch attempt to refocus my Sense and discover the source of the muted voice. The more I tried to find it, the more I realized it was indeed emanating from Bartimaeus himself, or at least from something directly on his person- which seemed unlikely, seeing as he was wearing very little in the way of clothing. For a few seconds, I only caught brief fragments of speech, but then a few sentences came into focus.

“-so incredibly idiotic. Humans still don’t know a real threat when they see one, do they? Especially children… They should be tucked into their beds, listening to a bedtime story-”

“What…? Did you... did you say something?” I muttered loudly. The voice sounded exactly like Bartimaeus’, though that was impossible- the boy’s mouth was closed. Well, it was for a second, and this his lips split into another wide grin.

“Oh, you heard that, did you?” he said, a mild hint of excitement in his tone. “I'm not entirely sure how, but... Congratulations; you just got a glimpse into one of the most brilliant minds in history!”

Before I had a chance to respond, there was a harsh tug on my hand and I was pulled around the corner of the hallway, forcing my gaze away from Bartimaeus. To my relief, the portal was still there, and I wordlessly followed Lockwood and George through. While I was certainly curious to figure out what exactly was happening, I had to admit that I was beginning to feel rather uneasy.

Despite George’s protestations, Lockwood refused to let go of our hands until we were standing in the mansion's atrium on our side of the mirror.

“What’s gotten into you?!” George asked, once Lockwood had determined it safe enough to let us regain control of our own limbs. Lockwood took a deep breath, his gaze flickering between George and I before finally settling onto me.

“You heard something in there, right, Luce?” he asked. I nodded, and Lockwood mirrored the gesture. “Thought so. I definitely saw something, too… I’m not entirely sure what it was, but I didn’t have any inclination to stay and find out.”

“Well, regardless of whatever supernatural things you two sensed, that boy was certainly full of it,” George commented, blinking rapidly as he cleaned off his glasses. “’Bartimaeus’… ridiculous!”

“Should we know why that name has any significance?” I asked with a raised eyebrow.

“No, not unless you’ve done a bunch of historical research… which I highly doubt, Lucy, since it’s a struggle for you even pick up a newspaper most days.” I sucked in a breath, readying a retort, but George continued. “Bartimaeus is the name of a supposed ‘djinni’ that apparently caused a lot of strife throughout various times in the past. ‘Course, that’s under the assumption that magical beings are real, which they obviously are not.”

“Whatever the case may be, there was definitely something off about him,” Lockwood spoke up, suddenly removing his own glasses, apparently forgetting that they had still been covering his eyes this entire time. He then lapsed into silence, and neither George nor I had any further comments to make, each of us lost in various thoughts and questions about our recent encounter.

Finally, Lockwood straightened up and gave George and I a matching pat on the back.

“Well, no use worrying about it now; in fact, I say we seal up the portal and move on with the investigation,” Lockwood proclaimed. George and I spared each other a glance and nodded, agreeing that this was the most suitable course of action. “Great! We can tell DEPRAC about the mirror at the end of the night- once we find the real Source of this mansion’s haunting.”

“Good plan,” I agreed, and George simply shrugged. With that, we walked back to the mirror, a little more cautiously than before, and quickly surrounded it with salt and iron chains. As soon as the end chain links were placed together, my focus in the house instantly shifted; whereas my attention had previously been directed to the hum coming from the dark glass in front of me, I now detected a faint moan from the upper floor of the mansion. Lockwood stared upward as well, as if he could see the faint echo of a death-glow through the ceiling above.

Flashing equally bright grins to counteract George’s vaguely annoyed pout, Lockwood and I made our way towards the grand staircase located in the entryway. I swore that I heard a faint voice call for me, but when I glanced back to the mirror, its surface was as dark and still as it should be. I shrugged this off and ran to catch up with my fellow Agents, the thought of the strange Egyptian boy quickly pushed to the back of my mind.

[snsmissionaries]

2/6/19 -- Sister Nicole Ritman, Spain, Madrid Mission

The Story of Sany/I'm Officially a Cultured Citizen

Subject Line: This email will have two parts! The first is the story of our amiga Sany, who got baptized last Sunday, shared with permission. The second is just about my week.

 The Story of Sany

 Right about when I got to Málaga, we got a text from one of the members saying she had a friend we could go visit. She'd been going through some rough times, and so a few weeks back their other friend gave her a Libro de Mormón and just said "Sany, you mean a lot to me and I know you are going through a hard time. I'm giving this to you because this is what brings me comfort when I'm not feeling good and so I wanted to share it with you because you know I'd do anything to make you feel better and this is something that's important to me. You don't have to read it if you don't want, but I know it can help you." Sany started reading and once she told them she liked it, they invited us to teach her more. I don't know if you all remember, but like a month back I said that we had a first lesson with someone and I'd never seen someone change so much in just one lesson? Well that was Sany! Everytime we taught her, she was so committed to really studying and learning. She applied what she was learning to what she already knew and what she found the guide to the scriptures even though we hadn't showed her yet and looked it up there. She did the 21 day challenge of the Libro de Mormón diligently and really followed the commitments we extended. I don't think we ever had to extend a commitment twice and some she was already doing before we could extend (like starting on Ven Seguime as soon as she finished the 21 day desafío). 

A miracle that happened with Sany was that she lives here and has two daughters living in the Dominican Republic. Well one day Sany told us "I just found out that the church my daughter goes to is the same one! I didn't remember the name but she told me she told me three years back when her boyfriend introduced her to the church and got baptized. She's going on a mission in a few months and is getting ready to go to the temple." Well we were speechless. I'm not making it sound as surprising as it was, but seriously the member we had in the cita and both if us were like" what??!". It's so crazy how they found the church independent of another and gained their own testimonies and now are working to go to the temple together. I wish the missionaries that baptized her daughter would know this extension of the story! 

What I was most impressed with was that most people who work as internas (live-in caretakers for a senior) don't come to church because they work. Well Sany took her work to church. (I'm sure not everyone could but this was her solution). She would get up super early to get both the Señora and herself ready and would carry the wheelchair down the flights of stairs and push her all the way up the giant hill. We'd help her and the Señora loved going out for a stroll, yelling "venga, vamos, rápido! Rápido!" No quiero llegar tarde!" until I was practically running. Going down the hill is almost harder because you have to pull it from not speeding down into traffic. Good times jaja. The day of the baptism, she got permission to get off a few hours earlier to go to church and drop off the Señora. She was so excited! But then this Sunday she got super sick. :/ Good thing we had the baptism last week. 

 I'm Officially a Cultured Citizen 

 So I'll start this part of with a sad story. Three days after the baptism, we got a text saying the man who had baptized Sany had passed away. We hardly believed it, but we asked the Elders and the pres de Sociedad de Socorro and the Elders confirmed the text was talking about him. 

We actually were on our way to a cita with Sany so we gave her the sad news and she was so sad because she was so grateful to him for being a part of her step on the convenant path. We had a good discussion about life and death and the plan of salvation and I was feeling pretty reflective and pensive. 

Then, we leave the cita and see that the pres texted us. And guess what--it's turns out that he's not actually dead! He's not dead its his brother in law! Still sad for his family, but man alive we were so embarrassed. What a big fat fail. Probably the biggest one I'll ever have on the mission. I reread the original text and totally not our fault--it was written in a way that didn't clarify who they were talking about. But literally it was so crazy because lemme tell you it's a weird feeling to find out someone passed but it's a weirder feeling to find out that PSYCH they haven't. Like a TV show in real life except the jokes on you because you have to text the mission office and say "nevermind- we don't actually have to know what happens when we need a signature on the baptismal record of someone who's dead." I'm sure they think we're crazy jaja. And then when we texted Sany all she said was "ahhhh- vale." Luckily she hadn't brought it up since. I'm also glad we found out before Sunday when he would've walked into church alive and all three of us faint of shock. 

 So I chose the header because I felt like it has been a very *cultural* week! Yesterday, we went over for almuerzo with a Tibetan Man and his Moroccan wife and had cous-cous. Literally one of the best things that's ever entered my mouth! Basically you boil a bunch of tasty vegetables and pumpkin and halal beef and spices like cinnamon in a pot for an hour, and then pour it over a giant thing of cous-cous (tiny ball-shaped grain) and pour the broth, gravy all over. We were so close to finishing but we had a slice of pumpkin and some cabbage left. They gave us plates to help us eat the meat, but they wouldn't let us portion it out. We all used our spoons and ate from the same giant platter. They also wouldn't let us drink cold water until after the hot food because I guess mixing cold and hot is bad for your stomach. I suppose that's why they traditionally drink tea at meals, but since we politely refused the tea 50 times no lie (the wife didn't understand until I said it wasn't halal for us jaja and even after the husband would sip his tea and say "oh how delicious! Oh how healthy! Made with 5 herbs!" and made us smell it because we wouldn't sip it lol), we had mint infusion, which is just a fresh mint sprig with hot water poured on top and a little spoon of sugar. It was so good we bought fresh mint today to make it again! Maybe it won't be the same because we don't have the fancy Arab teapot they used to heat the water jk. Definitely an eating cita I'll never forget. 

 Then for Pday today I felt extra cultural because we went to the interactive music museum and saw instruments from all over the world! We stayed in the room with the piano, guitars and cello the longest and all played songs together. (OK in reality I tinkered a tune  while Hermana Zito played the cello. It's her major at BYU and it was worth my museum entry fee to hear her play lol We would all request songs and if she had the tune in her head she could just play it). I also loved the rooms where you jam out to crazy world instruments like the zither, the nose flute, double-guitars and even an ancient harp thing made from a human skull. (you pressed buttons to hear sounds of the instruments you weren't allowed to play). There was also a gladd floor with a medieval wall they uncovered and put a museum time capsule for 2033. I'll be back when they open that! 

 After we went to an Italian restaurant because H Mecca said it looked close to authentic. She ordered in Italian and chatted with the waiter and told us what to order. I felt a little less fake with her lol. We got gnocchi and margherita pizza and the other Hermanas got pasta carbonara which I tried and was probably the best. She gave it a 9/10 for authenticity so I figured that's as close as I'll get until I go visit her in Italy. 

 Then as we were walking back some guy stopped me (somehow he didn't notice the other Hermanas-just me) and in English (was Spanish but was determined to use only English) said "are you from the Mormon church? I love that church! I studied with the boys in Granada. I want to learn again." Hope he's cool and not creepy so I'll keep you updated if he ends up being cool! 

 Also something special about today is a finally debuted my pants! Hermana Mecca did too. Some pics mine don't look too flattering but they're not that bad in real life I promise. I didn't realize how cold my legs were all the time until I wore my pants! 

 Sometimes it's frustrating when you think of everything you should be doing as a missionary that you're not or you try to do but noon shows up (cough cough people who told us they would come to the capacitación H Mecca and I planned and didn't) but the mission is about learning to deal with daily disappointment and trying to find the little adventures. Like when we found a gorgeous historic Barrio in the foothills and the wind was blowing too much for wearing a skirt and it was too confusing to find a single address we wanted to pass by, but it was so gorgeous and so Spanish we weren't even mad jaja. And tip: if you ever accidentally offend a member, they will be appeased with brownies. I'm telling you brownies are the secret here! Convinced!!! 

 Os quiero, 

 Hermana Ritman 

 Contact Information

email: nicole.ritman@myldsmail.net

 Sister Nicole Ritman

Madrid Spain Mission

Avenida de Tenerife, 11

28703 San Sebastian de los Reyes

Madrid, Espana

 Malaga Week 8

https://photos.app.goo.gl/ULpL71c36qcwtFw28

[jeroldlockettus]

Evolution, Accelerated (Rebroadcast)

(Photo: Jack Dykinga / U.S. Department of Agriculture)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Evolution, Accelerated.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

A breakthrough in genetic technology has given humans more power than ever to change nature. It could help eliminate hunger and disease; it could also lead to the sort of dystopia we used to only read about in sci-fi novels. So what happens next?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. 

*      *      *

Today we’re bringing you an episode from our archives called “Evolution, Accelerated.” The story is a fascinating one, and, like most good stories, it has continued to develop. You can find our updates at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Jennifer DOUDNA: I remember standing in my kitchen cooking dinner for my son and I suddenly just burst out laughing. It was this joyful thought of, “Isn’t it crazy that nature has come up with this incredible little machine?”

The history of science is full of accidental discoveries. Penicillin, perhaps most famously, but also gunpowder and nuclear fission. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Because you don’t know what you don’t know; you don’t always know what you’re looking for, or at. Sometimes you’ve just got a curious mind.

DOUDNA: The research project that led to this technology was really a curiosity-driven project.

Jennifer Doudna is a professor of chemistry and biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

DOUDNA: And I’ve had a longtime interest in understanding fundamental biology. In particular, aspects of genetic control and the way that evolution has come up with creative ways to regulate the expression of information in cells.

Stephen J. DUBNER: When you first heard the phrase CRISPR — just describe that moment, what your understanding of it was and what you initially envisioned it facilitating.

DOUDNA: When I first heard the acronym CRISPR, this was from a conversation with Jill Banfield, I had no idea what that was.  

This was in 2006. Banfield, also a Berkeley scientist, had been studying bacteria that grow in toxic environments.

DOUDNA: She was looking at bugs that grow in old mine shafts — and these pools of water that build up in in old mines that are often very acidic or they have various kinds of metallic contaminants — to figure out what bugs are growing there and how are they surviving.

The key to their survival was called CRISPR: “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.”

DOUDNA: Say that five times fast.

Banfield thought the bacteria had developed a sort of pattern-based immune system to protect themselves. But exactly how it worked was a puzzle. To help solve it, she recruited Doudna.

DOUDNA: We ended up spending several afternoons where Jill was showing me her D.N.A. sequencing data from bacteria and explaining what these sequences were.

What began as a casual conversation about an obscure subject grew to consume Doudna for years. Finally, she had a breakthrough.

DOUDNA: And I suddenly just burst out laughing.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: the mind-blowing discovery that’s already changing medicine, and more; the implications of that boundless change; and: if you think the genetic revolution is still years away — you should think again.

*      *      *

DUBNER: So, congratulations on your future Nobel Prize.

DOUDNA: [Laughs]

Jennifer Doudna hasn’t won the Nobel Prize yet, but it’s hard to imagine she won’t. We’ll go back to when she started working with Jill Banfield. Doudna learned that CRIPSRs were D.N.A. sequences stored in the cells of bacteria.

DOUDNA: You can think about it like a genetic vaccination card. It’s a way that cells store information in the form of D.N.A. from viruses to use in the future to protect cells if that virus should show up again in the cell.

But how did it work? And what might it mean if scientists could figure it out? In 2011, having already studied CRISPR for a few years, Doudna attended a microbiology conference in Puerto Rico. There, she met Emmanuelle Charpentier, then a researcher at Umeå University in Sweden. Charpentier was researching a “mystery protein” that she felt was the key to CRISPR. She and Doudna began a long-running collaboration.

DOUDNA: We were working together to understand the molecular basis. In other words, “What are the molecules that allow bacteria to find and destroy viral D.N.A.?” That was the question that we set out to address.

And in the course of that research …

DOUDNA: And in the course of that research we figured out that a particular protein — it has a name, Cas9 — is programmable by the cell.

A protein that can be programmed to fight viruses? You can start to see where this is going.

DOUDNA: The amazing thing that this Cas9 protein does is it works like a pair of scissors. It literally grabs onto the D.N.A. and cuts it at that place, at that precise place.

They thought: if nature could program this Cas9 protein to precisely edit D.N.A., why couldn’t they?

DOUDNA: It turns out that when this is transplanted into animal or plant cells — or human cells — it’s possible to introduce changes to the D.N.A. very precisely, and that’s how the technology fundamentally works.

Then came the night at home, cooking dinner for her son, when she burst out in joyful laughter at the sheer wonder — and the massive possibilities.

DOUDNA: “Isn’t it crazy that nature has come up with this incredible little machine?” So there was that moment, and then that morphed into a growing recognition that this technology was going to be very impactful in many different areas of science.

Doudna, together with Charpentier, and several other colleagues, wrote up their research and, on June 8, 2012, formally submitted it to the journal Science. It was published 20 days later. Suddenly, the world knew that the CRISPR-Cas9 system could be harnessed as a new gene-editing tool.

Linda WERTHEIMER in a clip from Weekend Edition Saturday: A new kind of genetic engineering is revolutionizing scientific research.

Melissa BLOCK in a clip from All Things Considered: Scientists think CRISPR could launch a new era in biology and medicine.  

Norah O’DONNELL in a clip from C.B.S. This Morning: CRISPR could help us rid us of diseases like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy — and even H.I.V. and cancer.

Jennifer Doudna had spent her career largely cloistered in laboratories. She didn’t have a high-profile background.

DOUDNA: I grew up in a small town in Hawaii.

Suddenly she was a scientific super-hero.

Gwen IFILL in a clip from P.B.S. News Hour: We explore those questions with Jennifer Doudna.

C.B.S.: Jennifer Doudna.

N.P.R.: Jennifer Doudna.

FOX: Jennifer Doudna.

Cameron DIAZ in a clip from the Breakthrough Prize: For harnessing an ancient bacterial immune system as a powerful gene-editing technology …

Dick COSTOLO in a clip from the Breakthrough Prize: … the breakthrough prize is awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna.

Doudna’s spent the past few years racing forward while also trying to slow things down. She wrestles with all this in a book she co-wrote with another CRISPR researcher, Samuel Sternberg. It’s called A Crack in Creation.

DUBNER: Why the title? It refers to what?

DOUDNA: At its core, the CRISPR gene-editing technology is now giving human beings the opportunity to change the course of evolution. And human beings have been affecting evolution for a long time, right? But now there’s a technology that allows very specific changes to be made to D.N.A. that gives us a new level of control. And so it’s opening a crack. I see it as analogous to opening a door to the future that is a change in the way that we think about our world.

DUBNER: As opposed to a crack in the dimension that we will fall through and all disappear. Not that kind of crack?

DOUDNA: We hope the former, not the latter.

DUBNER:You write in the book, “We uncovered the workings of an incredible molecular machine that could slice apart viral D.N.A. with exquisite precision.” So when you call it an “incredible molecular machine” — your breakthrough, of you and your colleagues — is it essentially an external, human-guided replica of what already exists? Or are you taking over the controls of what inherently exists?

DOUDNA: This is important. We’re really taking over the controls of what already exists. We’re doing it by using this bacterial system, the Cas9 protein, to find and make a cut in D.N.A. in, let’s say, human cells at a particular place where the cells’ natural repair machinery can then take over and do the actual editing.

DUBNER: What’s amazing to me is the natural repair machinery obviously exists, and maybe it works really well a lot of the time. It’s just in the most drastic circumstances, like a cancer or a debilitating disease, it doesn’t. The healing mechanism, from reading what you’ve written, it sounds as though it’s quite stochastic — it’s random, unpredictable. Some things it catches, some things it doesn’t, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Can you talk about big picture of this repair mechanism and how well or poorly it does?

DOUDNA: D.N.A. repair happens all the time in cells and, as you alluded to, it has to work right most of the time or we would probably not be here or we would all have a lot more cancer than we have. So we know that cells experience double-stranded breaks to their D.N.A. routinely and that they have ways of fixing those breaks. I would say that what this CRISPR technology does is it really taps into that natural repair pathway.

Since the announcement of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology, scientists around the world have been exploring its possibilities in many different arenas. Let’s start with plants.

DOUDNA: I think it’s important for people to appreciate that, first of all, that humans have been modifying plants for a long time genetically.

DUBNER: Thank goodness.

DOUDNA: For literally thousands of years. Exactly. Thank goodness. And you realize, “Wow, I’m glad there’s plant breeding.” But the way that that’s been done traditionally is to use chemicals or even radiation to introduce genetic changes into seeds and then plant breeders will select for plants that have traits that they want. Of course, you can imagine, when you do something like that, you drag along a lot of traits that you probably don’t want and changes to the D.N.A. that you don’t even control for. So you don’t even know where they are or what they might be doing.

The opportunity here with gene editing in plants is to be able to make changes precisely. Not to drag along traits that you don’t want; to be able to make changes that will be beneficial to plants but to do that very precisely. Then we have the opportunity to do things like give plants the ability to grow with much less water or to defend themselves against various kinds of infections and pests that are moving in due to climate change. From the perspective of the world food supply, that’s going to be extremely important going forward and will potentially allow us to have access to plants that are going to be much better adapted for particular environments and to grow, we hope, without chemical interventions of different types.

DUBNER: Now, given how nervous some portion of the population is about the phrase “genetically modified organisms” — even though, as you’ve pointed out, almost every organism on earth has been genetically modified for hundreds if not thousands of years — this feels like a next-level step that will raise all kinds of questions — even in the plant world, forget about humans or animals — of governance and autonomy and so on. What are your thoughts on that in the plant/agricultural world?

DOUDNA: It’s really going to come down to people having access to information about where our food is coming from so that people in different countries can evaluate these plants and the technologies used to create them and make their own decisions about what they want to do. Having a precision tool that allows us to generate plants that are better adapted to particular environments or maybe have even better nutritional value — I really believe that, going forward, we can’t afford to reject this. We really have to understand it and regulate it appropriately. But we do have to have this tool in our toolbox.

CRISPR gene-editing is also being put to use on animals.

Scott PELLEY in a clip from C.B.S. Evening News: Scientists in China are engaged in controversial research, genetically modifying beagles to be more muscular.

Isobel YEUNG in a clip from VICE: These mosquitoes have been genetically modified to breed with and eliminate their own species in an urgent attempt to wipe out carriers of Dengue fever.

Ameera DAVID in a clip from R.T. AMERICA: Researchers believe that they can recreate a woolly mammoth by combining its D.N.A. with that of a modern elephant.

DOUDNA: There’s at least one — and maybe more than one company now — that are using the gene-editing technology in animals like in pigs to create pigs that would be better organ donors for humans.

DUBNER: I like the micropig too. Sean DOWLING in a clip from Buzz60: Chinese genomics institute BGI began breeding micropigs to study diseases — but now they’re going to sell them as pets for $1,600 and give into the micropig craze. Miley Cyrus has one. DOUDNA: Yes, pets. Right, the idea of sort of a fanciful use in a way of getting you know making animals that we think are cute.

*      *      *

The gene editing revolution prompted by the work of scientists like Jennifer Doudna isn’t the only gene-related revolution these days.

DUBNER: Hey, Dalton. Stephen Dubner. How’s it going?

CONLEY: Hi, Stephen. How are you?

There’s also social genomics.

Dalton CONLEY: The social genomics revolution is really just getting started, I would say.

Dalton Conley teaches sociology and population studies at Princeton…

CONLEY: …and I’m the co-author of The Genome Factor.

You may remember Conley from an old Freakonomics Radio episode called, “How Much Does Your Name Matter?” He has two kids. A daughter:

E JEREMIJENKO-CONLEY: I’m E, like the letter.

And a son.

Yo JEREMIJENKO-CONLEY: I’m Yo, like the slang.

But those are just their first names. Full names?

E JEREMIJENKO-CONLEY: E Harper Nora Jeremijenko-Conley.

Yo JEREMIJENKO-CONLEY: Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley.

DUBNER: So Yo, your first name, Yo, comes from where?

YO: I think it comes from the Y chromosome.

So Dalton Conley, the sociologist dad — he’s always had a crafty way of thinking about genetic identity.

DUBNER: So Dalton, the subtitle of your book is, “What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals About Ourselves, Our History, and the Future.” Just begin by telling me, what do you mean by the social genomics revolution? What’s revolutionary about it? And describe the arc of the revolution and where we are in that.

CONLEY: The social genomics revolution is really just getting started, I would say. When Bill Clinton stood up in the year 2000 and announced that the book of life had been decoded…

President Bill CLINTON in a clip from the National Human Genome Research Institute: We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.  

CONLEY: …everyone thought everything was going to change suddenly. We’re going to have personalized medicine, we were going to — I don’t know what.

CLINTON: It will revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.

CONLEY: But actually not much happened for the first decade or so.

The great scientific hope was to find single, easily identifiable genes that controlled cancer or depression or intelligence or even just height.

Jason FLETCHER: So that turns out to be an exception rather than a rule.

That’s Jason Fletcher. He’s an economist at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, and he Conley’s co-author on The Genome Factor.

FLETCHER: Most of what we care about, most of life’s important outcomes, are not one gene and one disease. They’re more like hundreds or thousands of genes all with really tiny effects, if you can even find them.

Having a map of the genome was one thing. But, in the Bill Clinton era, there was a lack of good data. That has changed.

CONLEY: And now we have this: what I call the revolution is this surfeit of cheap genetic data.

FLETCHER: Just two decades ago, it cost a billion dollars to sequence a single genome. Now you and I could spit in a cup, send it to one of the popular sequencing outfits, and for $100 or for $150 we can get millions of answers to the question, “What does our D.N.A. look like?”

CONLEY: Anyone who sends their saliva into 23andMe —

Clip from a 23andMe advertisement: With just a small saliva sample, you’ll learn about your ancestry through your 23 pairs of chromosomes that make you who you are.

CONLEY: — to get their ancestry or their supposed health risks has now basically agreed to be part of their database that will be studied and that has well over a million samples of mostly U.S. citizens.

FLETCHER: And all that data is being pulled together in both genetic analysis and social science analysis to try to understand the vast array of outcomes we’re all interested in. That’s anything from Alzheimer’s and dementia on the health side to measures of educational attainment and socioeconomic position on the social science side.

CONLEY: And so we finally have big data sets with lots of genetic markers across the entire set of chromosomes. We’re now actually making robust discoveries that are withstanding replication and seem pretty solid. That’s the start of the revolution.

But, warning: it’s still early days.

FLETCHER: That’s right. So humans are very complicated, and the amount of data we’re talking about is in the millions or tens of millions of locations on our genome.

So what does this mean for a technology like CRISPR gene-editing?

CONLEY: That’s going to be very exciting for a limited number of single-gene diseases.

Diseases like cystic fibrosis, and sickle-cell disease, and Huntington’s disease.

CONLEY: But most things we care about in today’s world — heart disease, Alzheimer’s, I.Q., height, body mass index, diabetes risk — all of those things are highly polygenic. That means that they’re the sum total of many little effects all across the chromosomes, and that probably means we’re not going to be doing gene-editing in a thousand different locations in the genome.

At least not anytime soon. But, with all the genomic data that are being accumulated, scientists have been devising a system to make sense of it all.

CONLEY: We have a tool that’s emerged called the polygenic score.

FLETCHER: You take all the small effect sizes that you’re finding across many, many, many genes. You add them all up, and then you created a summary scale of your predicted likelihood of doing X, where X could be smoking or getting dementia or going to college.

CONLEY: But those scores aren’t predicting very well right now. So before anything drastic happens socially, those scores would need to get a lot better. Once they really start explaining a lot of the variation in society, then I would start worrying.

Worrying because why?

CONLEY: The use by external authorities and companies of this information, that’s definitely scary. The other dimension is going to be in the marriage market, where people just take it upon themselves to want to know genetic information about their potential mates. If you knew that your potential mate was of high likelihood of developing early dementia, you might think twice before getting married. Phenotypes are for hookups but genotype is forever. So the technology for that is here now. It could be used in fertility clinics. It could be used on dating apps, where people could put their genetic profile linked from 23andme to OKCupid.

Selection, of course, is something we all do every day. It’s how we choose our friends; our allies and enemies; our political leaders. Some traits are observable; others, less so. Some are heritable; others, not. If the selection potential afforded by these new technologies is frightening to you, keep in mind the thing that’s new about this is the technology. Remember the eugenics movement? That was justified by a preference for …

FLETCHER: … a preference for people of certain European ancestry — and not all European ancestry, but certain favored groups — to have more children and to be given resources to the exclusion of all other people. Of course, it led pretty directly to Nazism and the extermination of millions of people. It was also used as the pseudoscience behind at least decades of racial injustice in the United States and many other countries.

That is the nightmare that has given Jennifer Doudna actual nightmares.

DOUDNA: That really was one of the defining moments for me in terms of thinking about getting involved in the ethical conversation. I had a dream in which I was working away — I think I was in my office actually — and a colleague of mine came in and said, “I’d like to introduce you to someone, and I’d like you to explain the CRISPR technology to him.” And he led me into a room. There was a light in the room and there was someone sitting in silhouette in a chair with his back to me. He turned around, and I realized with this horror — and I can feel it right now as I’m telling you the story, I feel this chill in my body — I realized that it was Adolf Hitler. And he was looking at me with very intent look on his face, an eager look. He wanted to know about this technology.

I felt this incredible sense of fear; both personal fear, but also a profound existential fear that if someone like that were to get a hold of a powerful technology like this, how would they deploy it? And when I woke up from that dream — and thinking about it subsequently — it was really scary to think about. I thought, “We have to proceed responsibly here.” We cannot just — or at least for myself — I can’t just carry on with my next experiment at my lab. I really have to get involved in a broader discussion about this. It’s just too important a subject.

DUBNER: I don’t mean to at all diminish your argument, but I hear a lot of scientists make a similar argument, which is, “Look, we’re doing our best on our end, and we really want to have this conversation in public, especially with people who have the leverage,” mostly politicians, “to make smart choices.” Does a good mechanism or forum for that conversation really exist?

DOUDNA: Well, we’re building it as we’re going, at some level. I’ve been involved in organizing a number of meetings. Right now, they’re fairly small in focus. But the idea is to really answer, we hope, that question that you just posed: how do you do that? How do you bring people from these different walks of life together so they can have a meaningful discussion? I don’t have the answer yet, but I do think that it has to involve formats that are accessible to people. It can’t just be a bunch of academics.

DUBNER: Talking in the silo to each other.

DOUDNA: Right, exactly. It cannot be that. It has to be using various ways. The media are going to be very important. People that write science fiction are going to be important. Movie makers are going to be important. Musicians and various kinds of visual artists are going to be important. All of those people are very skillful at communication, communicating ideas, and they can do it in some ways much more effectively than a lot of technical jargon would ever achieve.

DUBNER: Probably the most enticing and certainly the most controversial aspect of CRISPR is the power to reshape human beings, whether an individual with an illness, a generation of a family, or maybe an entire population. Obviously, it’s a gigantic area and something that probably brings a lot of strong priors to the table with already. But can you just talk about this issue, your thinking about the issue and where you’ve landed?

DOUDNA: I’ve seen an evolution in my own thinking, quite frankly. I have gone from feeling very uncomfortable with the idea of making changes to human embryos, especially for anything that would be considered not medically essential, to thinking that there may come a time — I don’t think we’re there now and I don’t think it’s right around the corner — but I think there may come a time when that application is embraced and it’s going to be deployed. For me, the important thing is not to reject it. It’s actually to understand it and really think through the implications.

DUBNER: Let me ask you to just to take a step back and talk about actual therapeutic treatment and the difference between germline and somatic editing.

DOUDNA: Ah, yes. That’s very important, to understand the difference. Most of the applications that we’ve been talking about, especially in medicine right now, involve what we call somatic-cell editing. That means making changes to the D.N.A. in cells of a particular tissue in a person that’s already fully developed. But those changes do not become heritable. They can’t be passed on to the next generation. But the contrast to that is changes to the germline. That means making changes to the D.N.A. of embryos or eggs or sperm, changes that are inherited by future generations and become effectively permanent in the human genome.

There’s a profound difference between those two uses. If you’re doing something that affects one person, it has to be regulated, of course, and you have to make sure that it’s safe and effective, but it affects just that one person. Whereas, if you make a change that affects somebody’s children and all of their children’s children, etc. — that is really profound and it really does affect, ultimately, human evolution.

DUBNER: Let’s say I cared about some strain of heritability enough to do it on a fairly wide scale. Then presumably, it would increase my incentive to maybe diminish the supply of non-germline treated people, right? So you could imagine —

DOUDNA: Now you’re getting into Gattaca territory here.

DUBNER: Well, it doesn’t take long, even for a mind as flabby as mine, to get there pretty quickly, right? The potential for this reminds me a bit of the potential for geoengineering, intentionally altering the planet’s atmosphere to change the temperature in case global warming gets really destructive. One of the key questions there is governance. Who gets to control the thermostat? And I know that you’ve been outspoken and you’ve really flung yourself into the ethical and practical elements of this technology, but I’m curious where you stand on the biggest — I don’t want to say scariest, because I hate when we’re knee-jerk scared of new technologies that are prima facie wonderful — but I do wonder your thinking on that.  

DOUDNA: You alluded to this, but I think it’s very important to emphasize that this technology is going to, overall, have a very positive benefit to human beings in many ways. I’d really like to make sure that people get that message. Because I think it’s easy to try to make things sound exciting by making them sound really scary.

DUBNER: Sure.

DOUDNA: This is a technology where we’re already seeing incredibly exciting advances: opportunities to cure genetic diseases that have had no treatments in the past, to advance the pace of clinical and other types of research, to make it possible to understand the genetic basis for disease and then be able to do something about it when you have that information. What needs to happen is that scientists need to really engage with government regulators and, frankly, also with religious leaders and other kinds of thought leaders to make sure, first and foremost, that there’s a very clear understanding of the science behind this as much as possible.

DUBNER: Let’s pretend that this technology within a couple of generations works so beautifully that it extends lifespan by 20 percent or 50 percent or 200 percent. Do you think about what happens in terms of obvious things like global resources if people are living twice as long? But also, how we as animals would respond to that scenario in which scarcity diminishes so much, the scarcity being a short lifespan? It seems that humans are relatively slow to adapt to the diminishment of scarcity over time. It seems we still eat, for instance, in the 21st century, as though the next meal may or may not appear on the horizon. I’m curious, if all of a sudden there are all these extra years — in terms of everything, labor markets and retirement and existential issues — like, “What do I do now for those next 80 or 100 years that Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues helped facilitate?” Do you think about those things?

DOUDNA: There’s lots of interest in that topic right now as you know, especially here in Silicon Valley. For me, it really would come down to, are those extra years high-quality years? Are they years where people could be contributing importantly to society? And if the answer is yes then that is very interesting to think about. If the answer is no, then I certainly don’t think that sounds very appealing at all. I’d rather take short and healthy than the long and miserable. But the prospect of enhancing human health — if that goes hand-in-hand with longevity — I certainly would like to see it be something that was available to communities around the world, not just to a few people.

As much uncertainty as there is around the future of CRISPR-Cas9, and the genetic revolution generally, you probably won’t be surprised to learn there’s also uncertainty about where the proceeds from these discoveries will flow. As you can imagine, they are potentially huge. Jennifer Doudna’s team filed patent rights early on to use the CRISPR system on virtually any living thing. But not long after, a researcher named Feng Zhang from the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard filed CRISPR patents on an important subset of living things. The conflict went to the federal Patent Trial and Appeal Board, which ruled in Zhang’s favor; but the final outcome is far from settled.

A few updates since we first released this episode last year. The research journal Nature Methods published a paper suggesting that CRISPR wasn’t as precise as people like Doudna say it is. The authors claimed it caused 2,000 unexpected mutations. But that paper was recently retracted. In other news: the U.S.D.A. recently approved a broad range of gene-edited foods. CRISPR even featured as a major plot point in the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson movie Rampage. And on the intellectual property front: Doudna’s team at UC Berkeley is appealing the Patent Office’s decision; the European Patent Office, meanwhile, revoked the Broad Institute’s CRISPR patent there.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Stephanie Tam, Max Miller, Harry Huggins, and Andy Meisenheimer. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Jennifer Doudna, professor of chemistry and of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dalton Conley, Henry Putnam University professor of sociology at Princeton University.

Jason Fletcher, professor of public affairs, sociology, agriculture and applied economics, and population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

RESOURCES

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).

“CRISPR: A Game-Changing Genetic Engineering Technique,” Ekaterina Pak, Science in the News, (July 31, 2014).

The Genome Factor: What the Social Genomics Revolution Reveals About Ourselves, Our History, and the Future by Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher (Princeton University Press, 2017).

“Programmable D.N.A. Scissors Found for Bacterial Immune System,” Martin Jinek, Krzysztof Chylinski, Ines Fonfara, Michael Hauer, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier (2012).

“Questions And Answers About CRISPR,” Dom Smith and Matthew Orr, STAT News (2015).

“Welcome to the CRISPR Zoo,” Sara Reardon, Nature (March 9, 2016).

EXTRA

23andMe.

Gattaca (dir. Andrew Niccol, 1997).

“How Much Does Your Name Matter?” Freakonomics Radio (2013).

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