CRISPR Biotechnology Goes Wrong In New Robin Cook Novel 'Pandemic'

CRISPR has been in the headlines recently, as Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s claims he created gene-edited twin girls continue to be met with international outrage.

Use of the powerful gene-editing tool gone awry is also the focus of author and physician Robin Cook‘s new novel “Pandemic,” in which the mysterious death of a woman on a New York subway opens a window into a lab that’s pushing the boundaries of medical ethics.

The book’s antagonist is a wealthy Chinese scientist who’s settled in the U.S. and is funding a hospital and a gene-research empire. Cook tells Here & Now‘s Robin Young he wasn’t surprised to find out a Chinese scientist was also at the center of a real-life CRISPR controversy.

“The fact that my bad guy, so to speak, is a Chinese individual was not by accident,” Cook says. “The Chinese are very interested in biotechnology, as they are in all technologies. It’s also true that the Chinese philosophy is somewhat different from our philosophy. They don’t have the same sense of the importance of the individual versus the society.”

While Cook says he believes CRISPR is a milestone in biotechnology — “maybe even more important than the discovery of antibiotics” — its misuse could also mean significant dangers for humanity, like reducing cells’ resistance to viruses like influenza.

“There’s a lot of things that would keep you awake at night if you knew what was going on,” Cook says of what he found while researching the novel. “Unfortunately … CRISPR is so powerful and so easy to use.”

Interview Highlights

On why He Jiankui’s use of CRISPR has been so controversial

“[It was in secret], and it didn’t have any peer review, etc. It also is known that as accurate as this CRISPR/Cas9 is … it’s not completely, totally accurate. There can be other changes, other places in the genome, which if these kids survive and they go on to reproduce, that will be part of the human