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You're Invited: 5/1 WBUR Evening With Wunderkind CRISPR Scientists

Jonathan Gootenberg and Omar Abudayyeh (courtesy )
Jonathan Gootenberg and Omar Abudayyeh (courtesy )

Q: What acronym sounds like an adjective describing toast but is actually a bacterial trick that's now being harnessed to do amazing things in biology labs worldwide?

If you answered "CRISPR," you're already a scientifically literate citizen of the 21st century. But if you'd like to dig in deeper and learn more from two young leaders in the field, here's your chance: It's the inaugural evening of the Boston Brilliance series in CitySpace, WBUR's beautiful new event space. Tickets here; they're $5 and free for high school students. More details below:

Boston Brilliance is a WBUR CommonHealth series that introduces audiences to the brightest minds of Boston’s biomedical ecosystem.

Our guests on Wednesday, Omar Abudayyeh and Jonathan Gootenberg, are only 28 years old, but they just got their own lab at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Launching a lab at such a young age is kind of like graduating college at 14. They work on a particular area of CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing tool that has swept labs around the world in recent years. Together, they developed SHERLOCK, a tool to detect human disease – and are now hunting for CRISPR tools to treat diseases related to aging.

They’ll present their work at a lay-audience (mostly!) level and are game to talk about any aspects of CRISPR, life science, life as a young scientist, what their collaboration between a Palestinian scientist and a Jewish scientist means for the prospects of world peace — absolutely anything that you want to ask them. No question is too basic or too complex and no audience member is too young or too old.

Morning Edition Producer Khari Thompson moderates.

Headshot of Carey Goldberg

Carey Goldberg Editor, CommonHealth
Carey Goldberg is the editor of WBUR's CommonHealth section.

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