Noubar Afeyan: prediction

Transcript context

…Why is it that, right now, it seems so many biotech successes are turning into reality? They’re not just cool articles in The Atlantic. They’re things that are working. We’re now stage three on a malaria vaccine, CRISPR against sickle cell anemia. Why the sudden concentration? Is that computational techniques? It’s partly computational techniques, for sure. Convergence, as people call it, between technology and biology. I’ve been working in that space for 33 years, so it seems like an overnight success 33 years in the making, in the sense of there was no human genome back then. We didn’t know even what proteins were existing in the body. We’ve come a long way. We know things about hundreds of millions of bacterial sequences that occupy our gut. We’ve learned that viruses occupy our body that we could use for therapy. All these things. It’s the expanded frontiers coupled with — and this is what I would say, at least, that’s where we come from — the willingness and the ability to leap. My belief is that we’ve reached a level of capital, confidence, commitment, community, whatever of those C-letter-starting words that it takes to get to a critical mass where people are willing to leap. They’re not just incrementally doing “If A, then B, then B-prime, and then maybe C.” This sequential, incremental . . . Then look at the permission to leap. The permission to leap is given either by confidence or need. If you have a pandemic, you have permission and the need to leap. If you have serious diseases that you can truly cure through editing or gene therapy or whatever, you have an obligation. Those things are all converging, but yes, absolutely, capability. Those needs were there before. Now we have more and more capability. But I’ll tell you, 10 years from now, the capability we have will seem like 1 percent of the capability we will have. I’m very sure of that. Fifteen years from now, how will CRISPR make people’s lives better?…

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