Jennifer A. Doudna to Deliver Leff Lecture on April 15

Jennifer A. Doudna, Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at U.C. Berkeley, will deliver the Arthur Allen Leff Fellowship Lecture on April 15, 2019 at 4:30 p.m. in the Calabresi Faculty Lounge at Yale Law School. The title of the lecture will be “Rewriting the Code of Life: The Future of Genome Editing.”

In 2012, Doudna and her colleagues at U.C. Berkeley described a simple way of editing the DNA of any organism using an RNA-guided protein found in bacteria. This technology, called CRISPR-Cas9, has opened the possibility for human and non-human applications of gene editing, including assisting researchers in the fight against HIV, sickle cell disease, and muscular dystrophy. Doudna is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and has received many other honors including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Heineken Prize, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, and the Japan Prize. From 2000 to 2002, she was the Henry Ford II Professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale. She is the coauthor, with Samuel H. Sternberg, of A Crack in Creation, a personal account of her research and the societal and ethical implications of gene editing.

The Arthur Allen Leff Fellowship, established in memory of Arthur Allen Leff, Southmayd Professor of Law, brings to Yale Law School people whose work in other disciplines illuminates the study of law and legal institutions.