Fyodor Urnov
Clinic-minded genome + epigenome editor. Professor of Molecular Therapeutics, UC Berkeley. Director for Technology and Translation, Innovative Genomics Institute, ibid.
Beatles fan.
Art work credit: Fyodor Vasiliev "A Meadow in the Rain" (1872).
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- Call it Kahlua?
- This Thursday at the #ASGCT in New Orleans: Sadik Kassim (Danaher), Kiran Musunuru (Penn) and yours truly will chart a fundamentally new map to #CRISPR cures. See you at 830a (Room 291) and at 10a (Hall F). Image: Mary Cassatt "The Map" (1890)
- I am moved by news of the upcoming film about Rosalind Franklin. I have a Jewish great-grandmother, Marie Frenkel, who died in her late 30s of ovarian cancer. I can see her haplotypes in my DNA (see below) and often think of her and Franklin (who suffered the same fate). deadline.com/2025/05/nata...
- Here's great-grandma Marie and her DNA in mine. ❤️🥲 I actually use this to teach haplotypes as a concept. Also, I worked with Aaron Klug - who was Dr Franklin's last graduate student. Anyway, this is not a well-structured post, I'm just really affected there will be a movie about Rosalind Franklin.
- A tractable, actionable path to CRISPR cures on demand is much closer than one might think. Ryan Cross of @endpts.com reports in detail on this in a piece that covers work at the IGI and also Penn Medicine by Kiran Musunuru and colleagues. We'll find a way or make one. endpts.com/crispr-isnt-...
- .@nucleosomepolice.bsky.social did you leak the NCP structure to Lucas before publication?!
- Well, somebody had to do it @nucleosomepolice.bsky.social 😬 Did you know that the nucleosome inspires the Millennium Falcon design? #Maythe4thBeWithYou #MayThe4th #MayTheFourthBeWithYou
- PSA: if you fly into Phoenix in April and plan to hold a conference call scheduled in Pacific time - and make the assumption that Mountain time is 1 hr ahead ... you will miss your call and take a long time to remove egg from face. Arizona does not observe daylight saving time. #sapientisat #DUH
- Thank you @erictopol.bsky.social and @stemcells.bsky.social for being consistent voices of data- and knowledge-based reason (which was entirely absent from the colossal vat of dire gibberish in company pronouncements and TV coverage of their "achievement").
- Cue “When the Fats Come Marching In” (I will let myself out)
- Along with every geneticist I am a total Mendel groupie and this new figure (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) that shows the chromosome location and underlying basis of his allelic pairs moves me to near-tears. Oh, to fly back in time and show this to him ...
- It will take a while for upper-div Genetics textbooks to adapt, but adapt they must: the underlying basis for every single one of the trait differences Mendel studied is now known. Cue Janáček's Moravian dances in celebration! (see post below) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- In a stunning convergence Leoš Janáček was a student at the Abbey where Mendel was a friar - in 1884 he played the organ at Mendel's funeral service! I always think of the Moravian Dances as those that Mendel would have recognized with fondness. www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFmw...
- Cease all doom-scrolling and engage in joy-reading. Gene regulation people! Enough reporter assays (ew)! Enough lenti (yuck)! Do what Jesse did and the data-based truth of editing endogenous loci in human cells shall set you free! (couple this with the recent Findlay-Whiffin beauty for full joy).
- Following Harvard's lead on this, my University's home page now opens on our research contributions to a better world. #GoScienceBears www.berkeley.edu
- The dire story of the non-resurrected wolf gets worse with every colossal public inanity by the scientific team. It can at least be used to teach Bio1A students what the terms "species" and "phenotype" actually mean. Source: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
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- The concept of "species" is not an infinitely malleable one. For an animal like a wolf, a species has to be reproductively isolated from other canids. A grey wolf with 15 SNPs introgressed from a dire one - will not be isolated at all. So the "species" will vanish in one round of mating.
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- I could not agree more.
- Close all tabs and read this. Start with the preceding Nature paper. Trust me. This is cooler than liquid helium.
- But what about the Anna Pavlovian, which is all about ballet and meringue-based desserts? (I will let myself out)
- Yours truly and my inbox. [I will let myself out]
- This is so beautiful. Sincerely, Genetics professor From: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
- TIL that while both pi and square root of 2 are irrational, only pi is transcendental. Math truths are so eternal - it helps in our times.
- Professor Beth Shapiro - an HHMI investigator at UCSC (and CSO of Colossal) - is here making a statement that would get a Bio1A student at UC Berkeley (or UCSC) an F. What an embarrassment, what a painful scene of public shame for someone of such academic distinction...
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- I don't know Prof Shapiro personally and would give her the benefit of a doubt as to her personal motives. Those of Colossal Corporate are pecuniary in nature, no doubt about it.
- Professional gene editor and professor of Genetics here. The world does not need more negativity. It does not need more nonscientific hype, either. I will be data-based negative and say to Colossal: give me a double-strand break!! [1/3]
- Any undergrad in Bio1a would tell them that introgressing 12 SNPs by editing into an existing species and calling that a new species - is, well, salesmanship. They will make money on this and the media will give them all the coverage they need from that. [2/3]
- One other Bio1a-grade fact: this "new species" of - if released into the wild - will it be reproductively isolated from Canis lupus? If not, are the 12 SNPs on one haplotype that is in full LD? Was Time Magazine told about Mendel's 2nd law regarding 12 unlinked SNPs in meiosis?
- David's lab invented two major upgrades to genome editing - base (Alexis Komor, Nicole Gaudelli) and prime editing (Andrew Anzalone). While originating in an "academic" lab, both resonated loudly in the for-profit sector (Verve trial for hypercholesterolemia and Beam's - for A1AT deficiency).
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- I am a professor at UC Berkeley and given my institutional COI here it would be unprofessional of me to comment on that in public. Instead I will share a link to Alexis's and David's landmark paper (followed by Nicole's of course). Both from the Broad. ❤️ pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
- Jessie Sima's books ("Love, Z"; "Harriett Gets Carried Away"; "Not Quite Narwhal" &c) bring human warmth, creativity, and all-around loveliness. My 8yo daughter knows them by heart (as does her dad). If you have children and want to give them legitimate hope - one of Jessie's books wb perfect.
- Phe trp ile trp: Steve is an amazing scientist, human being, a Mensch, and a rising tide for the field of AAV gene therapy. I'm not labeling yours truly as chopped hepatocytes, I'm grateful for the nomination and eager to serve - I'm just saying I really like Steve.
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- You're not a replicant, so this trailing origami thing is a bit ... :-)
- The IGI has partnered with operating companies of the Danaher corporation to build a framework - and a companion cookbook - for CRISPR Cures on-demand. How are we doing? See below. www.genengnews.com/topics/genom...
- Fellow editors - some DMEM+FBS for our thought.
- The field of genetic privacy is not mine. Human genetics, genomics, and DNA-encoded disease risk - is. Can an authority in the genetic privacy space point me to a calmly formulated, data-supported justification for why one should delete 23andMe data? What is the realistic scenario of concern?
- President Obama is on this platform now (perhaps he's been here for a while - I just learned about this) - @barackobama.bsky.social This moment forever will be a highlight of my 35 years' in this country - both as a first-generation immigrant and a naturalized US citizen.
- This is 100% true for pharma blockbuster drugs in my area of practice - genetic medicines - such as Spinraza and Keytruda.
- A pie graph worth keeping in mind as the NIH budget plummets jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... for 356 new FDA drugs approved
- Hear, hear, hear!
- I first taught undergraduate biochemistry as a GSI at Brown in 1992 - Michaelis-Menten kinetics was on the first class. I find it important that an analytical framework as central to biochemistry as Euclidian postulates are to geometry was co-developed by a woman scientist. #WomenInStem
- Ok, I am biased - I co-organized this thing (with Drs Claire Booth and Laralynne Przybyla). But the talks were AMAZING! I will have my trainees watch like 10 of them at least!
- If you read the human genome out loud, 1 base at a time, it will take you a century to read it - yet a single typo can cause devastating disease. (H/t radiolab for the first part)
- One addition to Prof O'Rourke's essential read: yours truly and my fellow faculty who teach the sciences train undergraduate and graduate students in how to analyze data and derive conclusions from them. Fewer individuals with that ability means a populace easier to rule via fact falsification.
- Eric, yet again, is angstrom-level spot-on.
- Earlier I mentioned a phase 3 mRNA cancer vaccine trial for metastatic melanoma by Merck and Moderna. Here is one on approach for an even deadlier cancer.
- It appears the NIH is being told to abandon mRNA vaccines as a field. Did someone tell Merck and Moderna? They have a phase 3 trial for an mRNA vaccine in metastatic melanoma that has shown robust promise. Lancet paper w ph1/2 data: pubmed ID 38246194 www.merck.com/news/merck-a...
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- Here you go. I subscribe to STAT because it's a requirement in the line of work that I do. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/eeylu...
- Eric continues to be his inimitably erudite and informative self. What a beautiful thread.
- Trofim Lysenko - equimolar charlatan and fanatic - was the Neanderthal who did this to Genetics in the USSR (with Stalin's full support). This was quite recent - 1948. See pubmed 34739057. What was that Santayana quote about repeating history?
- Paul is an SME par excellence. Cannot recommend this strongly enough.
- Spectacular news this morning for CRISPR gene editing to treat genetic disease from Beam Therapeutics. This method was developed by David Liu's lab at the Broad. = "academic" science produces innovations that enables the biotech sector to build medicines investors.beamtx.com/news-release...
