The year is 2540 and people have become sterile. Human embryos are grown in factories, where they are manipulated and conditioned to develop predetermined conditions and complexions.
Reading Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World and similar dystopian novels as a child sparked an interest in the possibilities—and caveats—of genome manipulation tools in the young Brian Brown, now director of the Genomics Institute at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “The type of thinking that fictional writers apply is also important for scientists: what are the limits of human knowledge and technology, and how can we develop things to go past them?” Brown said.
Transcending these limits is the driving force behind Brown’s career; the geneticist has engineered technologies that improve gene editing, sequencing, and gene therapy methods. Perturb-map, Brown’s latest invention described in Cell, adds another tool to the experimental belt of cancer researchers.1 With this technology, which combines ...
