About Kevin Davies
Kevin Davies is a British science journalist and editor. He is currently the executive editor of The CRISPR Journal, based in New York. Kevin studied at Oxford University and moved to the U.S. in 1987 after earning his Ph.D. in genetics. He is the founding editor of the journal Nature Genetics and Bio-IT World magazine, former editor-in-chief of Cell Press, and the first publisher of C&EN, the weekly magazine of the American Chemical Society.
“EDITING HUMANITY” is Kevin’s fourth book, and first for Pegasus Books. He published “The $1,000 Genome” in 2010 and “Cracking the Genome,” about the race for the Human Genome Project, in 2000. His first book, “Breakthrough,” co-authored with the late Michael White, was about the race to identify the “breast cancer gene”. That resulted in Kevin serving as a technical consultant for the 2013 movie Decoding Annie Parker, starring Helen Hunt, Samantha Morton, and Aaron Paul. He’s also a co-author with Jim Watson and Andrew Berry of “DNA: The story of the Genetic Revolution“
You can find Kevin Davies on Twitter.
Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
One of the world’s leading experts on genetics unravels one of the most important breakthroughs in modern science and medicine.
Kevin Davies is the executive editor of The CRISPR Journal and the founding editor of Nature Genetics. He holds an MA in biochemistry from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the University of London. He is the author of Cracking the Genome and The $1,000 Genome and co-authored a new edition of DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution with Nobel Laureate James D. Watson and Andrew Berry. In 2017, Kevin was selected for a Guggenheim Fellowship in science writing.
If our genes are, to a great extent, our destiny, then what would happen if mankind could engineer and alter the very essence of our DNA coding? Millions might be spared the devastating effects of hereditary disease or the challenges of disability, whether it was the pain of sickle-cell anemia to the ravages of Huntington’s disease.
But this power to “play God” also raises major ethical questions and poses threats for potential misuse. For decades, these questions have lived exclusively in the realm of science fiction, but as Kevin Davies powerfully reveals in his new book, this is all about to change.
Engrossing and page-turning, Editing Humanity takes readers inside the fascinating world of a new gene-editing technology called CRISPR, a high-powered genetic toolkit that enables scientists to not only engineer but to edit the DNA of any organism down to the individual building blocks of the genetic code.
Davies introduces readers to arguably the most profound scientific breakthrough of our time. He tracks the scientists on the front lines of its research to the patients whose powerful stories bring the narrative movingly to a human scale.
Though the birth of the “CRISPR babies” in China made international news, there is much more to the story of CRISPR than headlines seemingly ripped from science fiction. In Editing Humanity, Davies sheds light on the implications that this new technology can have on our everyday lives and in the lives of generations to come.
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