CRISPR'd: A Medical Thriller

Judy Foreman

Feb 2022 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

For fans of Julia Buckley and Tess Gerritsen, a debut featuring a killer in plain sight using a microscopic murder weapon, the cutting edge gene-editing technology: CRISPR.

Boston geneticist Dr. Saul Kramer is on the cutting edge of genetic disease research. Revered among clients at his IVF clinic, he harbors a dark secret. In addition to helping infertile couples conceive healthy babies, Dr. Kramer is obsessed, for his own dark reasons, with an alternate mission as well. In certain patients, he uses the gene editing technology CRISPR to tamper with embryos, not to improve the health of the embryos, but to replace a healthy gene with a deadly mutation. A young female journalist, Sammie Fuller, begins to suspect what he has done when three infants conceived at his clinic die mysteriously, all at about one year old.  She and a molecular biologist work secretly in his MIT lab to identify any genetic defects in the deceased children and together make a chilling discovery. Thanks to Sammie’s blockbuster stories, which go viral, Dr. Kramer is charged with murder and winds up in court. In the subsequent dramatic court scenes, his feisty defense lawyer stuns the world with her defense. Set in this uneasy time of genetic engineering with CRISPR technology, Foreman, spins a compelling tale of love, revenge, and murder.
 

Ratings and reviews

Okay plot, though not terribly suspenseful, characters a bit two dimensional but not a bad effort for a first book. But I would not have finished it if it were not about CRISPR. As an expert in science communication and a working molecular biologist who has been in the middle of the whole CRISPR ethics debate, I wish the science scenes in the book were more accurate. Although a few high profile whackos have tried CRISPERing themselves via injection on YouTube it does not work that way, the doctor in the book could not just inject himself with the gene and alter every cell in his body. Nor would he be extracting genes from embryos to engineer them into cells or be able to do what he was doing without using up more reagents and amplifying DNA that would have alerted his coworkers. So I think this book is a bit alarmist notwithstanding the authors comments at the end. At least when Michael Crichton wrote Next he backed up most of his science and was much better at crafting a story.

This book was far too plot driven for my taste. The characters, especially the villains, weren't convincing, their motivations didn't work, for me. I enjoyed most the part about the CRISPR technology and the camaraderie among characters who were facing challenges together. That's what kept me reading despite my real dislike of those other aspects.

En for.mato de novela la autora trata magistralmente un caso de posible conflicto entre la biología molecular en su aplicación del instrumento CRISPR, la ética, la política aplicada a la reproducción humana y la aplicación de las leyes

About the author

Judy Foreman is a former Boston Globe health columnist and the author of three works of nonfiction. A Wellesley College grad (Phi Beta Kappa), She spent three years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil and has a Masters from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was a Lecturer on Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Fellow in Medical Ethics, also at Harvard Medical School, a Knight Science Fellow at MIT and a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. She has won more than fifty journalism awards including a George Foster Peabody Award and a Science In Society award from the National Association of Science Writers. She lives outside of Boston. CRISPR'd is her first novel.