"The potential is huge," says Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for her role in the discovery. "There is a coming revolution right now with CRISPR."

Last month, the Innovation Genomics Institute (IGI), which Doudna founded, hosted the Climate & Agriculture Summit at the University of California, Berkeley, where speakers highlighted the role that genome editing can play in addressing the rising dangers of climate change. Doudna sat down for a brief interview with MIT Technology Review on the sidelines of the closed-door event.

She and her coauthors published their landmark paper on the technique in Science 12 years ago, demonstrating that a bacterial immune system could be programmed to locate and snip out specific sections of DNA. The earliest patients have begun receiving the first approved medical treatment created with the genomic scissors, a gene therapy for sickle-cell disease -- and a growing list of foods created with CRISPR are slowly reaching grocery store shelves.

Many more CRISPR-edited plants and animals are on the way, and a number of them were altered to promote traits that could help them survive or thrive in conditions fueled by climate change, beginning to fulfill one long-standing promise of genetic engineering. That includes the offspring of two cattle that Acceligen, a Minnesota-based precision breeding business, edited to have shorter coats better suited to hotter temperatures. In 2022, the US Food and Drug Administration determined that meat and other products from those cattle "pose low risk to people, animals, the food supply, and the environment" and can be marketed for sale to American consumers.

Other companies are harnessing CRISPR to develop corn with shorter, stronger stalks that could reduce the loss of crops to increasingly powerful storms; novel cover crops that can help sequester more carbon dioxide and produce biofuels; and animals that could resist zoonotic diseases that climate change may be helping to spread, including avian influenza.

For its part, IGI is working to develop rice that can withstand drier conditions, as well as crops that may suck up and store away more carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas driving climate change.