Feng Zhang - one of the best scientists in the contemporary world

Live, don't just come and go like leaves.

"Clack, clack," in a noisy restaurant of Boston's Chinatown neighborhood, a mischievous girl is typing two chopsticks on steamed chicken legs. No one noticed the young man, wearing a polo shirt with jeans, sitting enjoying his breakfast with his daughter, wife and mother.

Well, no one knows who Feng Feng is, but the 35-year-old Asian man is a brilliant biologist in his generation. If compared to someone who is about to win the Nobel Prize, Zhang will have twice the chance.

His discoveries in science will be the beginning of an era in which people can cure all illnesses and suffering: from autism, schizophrenia to blindness and cancer. .

Or in another scenario, Zhang will become a big "sinner" , when the genetic modification technology he developed could open a dark age. There, every child before birth can be "programmed" as you like.

But everything is still a thing of the future. Right now, in a restaurant in the Chinese neighborhood, Zhang is simply a father, a husband and a son trying to explain his busyness. Why do you always go home at two or three in the morning? There are so many things at the lab, and a family meal like this is such a precious moment.

At the age of 35, Feng Zhang soon became a prominent biologist in his generation.

Year Zhang was 11 years old, his mother decided to leave China. Ms. Shujun Zhou brought her young son to settle in Des Moines, a city in Iowa, USA. Although having a degree in computer engineering, at that time, Zhou Shujun only asked for a job as a guest house manager. The lives of every Asian immigrant Asian family, perhaps, have started in such a difficult way.

A few years later, settling into life, it was then, little Zhang entered high school. It was around the time that an Asian woman always saw hours of parking in front of the school every night. She waited for her son to work late in a gene therapy laboratory.

Only when the autumn sky in Des Moines was dark, the car rolled. From the window, Zhang could see the two sides of the yellow leaves falling into the windscreen, obscuring Ms. Zhou's vision.

Yellow leaves die after a life of only a few months. Zhang's mother then talked about the shortness of life, explaining to him that a person could easily leave this world without leaving a mark on it.

The lesson was deeply embedded in Zhang's subconscious. Until now, Ms. Zhou occasionally repeated the story of "autumn leaves" , and her son would understand. "I want to try my best to do something different , " Zhang said.

Don't just come and go like leaves. He lived to dedicate many years of his passion for science, and then print on it great marks from a very young age.

Feng Zhang contributed to two major scientific discoveries, both of which had the opportunity to win a Nobel Prize.

Zhang invented two revolutionary technologies in neuroscience and genetics. Since he was a graduate student, he has been a key member of a research team at Stanford University.

Under the leadership of Professor Karl Deisseroth, Zhang worked with Edward Boyden, a young but talented American scientist. Together they created a "switch" for neurons called optogenetics.

With this method, Zhang could prove that controlled light is neurologically active . To date, optogenetics is still in widespread use by researchers around the world, helping them create neural circuit maps, applications in research for treatment of schizophrenia, depression and self century.

Zhang's research has generated a lot of attention and made his name known quickly. Robert Desimone, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology McGovern (MIT) even praised Zhang as a brilliant young scientist, "who owns a list of the most published works [at the age of ] in the history of neuroscience ".

Feng Zhang is considered to be the most successful person in the history of neuroscience, at his age.

However, the story does not stop there. A few years later, Zhang also made a breakthrough in larger scale than optogenetics. What immediately brought the young scientist, then 30 years old, into the ranks of the world's best biologists. How to quickly and easily edit the genome of plants, animals, and even humans? Zhang had an answer with CRISPR-Cas9 .

Genetic modification techniques based on this system are used in the laboratory to create cured, HIV-free human cells for mice with muscular dystrophy, cataracts and liver disease. transmission. It has also been used to improve crops such as rice, tomatoes, oranges, cigarettes and wheat.

Not only that, CRISPR-Cas9 also opens up the ability to modify genes in eggs, sperm and human embryos. With it, you can imagine a future when parents can choose how their children are born. Do you want your child to be a little more individual, a little taller, play a good sport and of course look beautiful? All can be done with CRISPR-Cas9, as easy as selecting a customized version of a computer or car line.

CRISPR-Cas9 "is changing the way people do science," said biologist Phillip Sharp, who won the Nobel Prize in 1993. It opened up a whole new era in molecular biology. At least 3 companies with venture capital of hundreds of millions of USD have been established in the field of CRISPR-Cas9.

This genetic modification technique developed so strongly that people had to blame that its new era came in a hurry, like at the age of Zhang's 30s. Scientists had to convene global conferences to call for humanity to use it responsibly.

When was the last time we witnessed something similar? Using something of science in a responsible way? That's the story after Otto Frisch, a Jewish physicist, designed the first theoretical mechanism for an atomic bomb explosion.

The charm of Zhang and CRISPR-Cas9 started very casually from one day in February 2011. At that time, there was a scientist visiting the Broad Institute, where Zhang was working, during a short-term mission. He presented his research on the bacterial genome containing an immune system called CRISPR.

Meanwhile, Zhang sat modestly in a row of seats at the end of the room, the young scientist's mind floating somewhere, until he caught the word "CRISPR". It immediately aroused the constant curiosity in the head of a scientist.

"I have no idea about CRISPR, but I investigated it on Google and felt very excited. It is fortunate that this field of research is quite new and does not have much material to read , " Zhang said. to speak. He had fled several days of the seminar program, staying in the hotel room to mull over scientific articles about CRISPR.

What Zhang learned after a few days of self-training in the hotel: CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats - A group of frequently repeated short symmetric segments) was discovered by microbiologists . It is an immune mechanism of bacteria that protects against viruses, allowing bacteria to cut viral DNA and disable them.

Back then, it was almost like that. Until later Zhang realized, if a little clever, he could use a protein called Cas9 to cut and modify human DNA based on the CRISPR system. It's really what he did.

CRISPR can kill the virus, "so that new yogurt has a funny flavor ," Zhang said. "Research in the field of CRISPR only aims to make yogurt better."

Of course that was just a joke, and Zhang's goal was beyond what other scientists could do at the time."We want to see if it is possible to make CRISPR work on human cells?" , he recalled a paragraph in an email sent to Le Cong, a colleague who also worked in the biotechnology field. " This is a breakthrough that will surely make a big buzz."

Back at Cambridge at the time, Le Cong immediately realized why Zhang was so excited about CRISPR. Other scientists are only focusing on CRISPR research on bacteria, he and Zhang can do this on mouse and human cells. Only then, when CRISPR worked successfully on high-level cells, did it become a medical breakthrough.

Zhang returned to the office, where he had a white board and met Cong. He listed on the checklist of experiments and tasks that the two will have to perform. The work is divided equally for both."That was the starting point for me and Zhang, then we worked frantically," Cong said.

Both spent months just experimenting with Cas9 enzymes , expecting the results of each day to see what it could do with the nucleus of the human cell, where just inside it, one could imagine a The universal key is circling in a liquid, the genetic code that is often called a gene.

CRISPR works with bacteria, non-human organisms. That's what nature has arranged. Many scientists around the world, at that time, did not have much difficulty in implementing bacterial gene editing works. But with other high-level cells like humans, no one is sure CRISPR and Cas9 will work.

"We want to prove that CRISPR is a better tool than TALE [a gene editing tool was also studied earlier by Zhang and Cong], that it will become revolutionary, becoming the choice for every scientist. If they want to edit genes , " Cong said.

Feng Zhang went to the Board Institute for a day of his work.

At the Board Institute, Zhang and Cong often work until 11 pm, sometimes later than that. Zhang has a job, he still has to go to the lecture hall as a professor and can only start experiments in the late afternoon. Normally, he and Cong will eat a bowl of ramen noodles or some Chinese fast food, before starting the night experiment.

Only once, they held a party in Zhang's apartment. Each person made a glass of Tequila, only one glass the first time they tried this Mexican wine. That night, Zhang and Cong returned to the lab as usual, they continued to work.

There are two important things that the young scientists duo must prove: CRISPR has the ability to modify genes in mouse and human cells, and these genes perform their functions. They have targeted fluorescent protein genes, which have been attached to Zhang from high school experiments.

A microscope and camera are used to observe green light spots. Their work was very simple, when Zhang and Cong saw that the less glowing cells were found, CRISPR corrected more fluorescence genes.

In 2012, their work reached a beginning of success. Zhang could choose to publish a scientific article, but he was patient and wanted to wait. The young scientist did not want to send some results just enough to be published, because his ambition was to make a breakthrough. Zhang said: "I want to wait until the job reaches the threshold to make a significant difference."

However, it seems that both he and Le Cong did not know whether there was a race in CRISPR technology outside their lab.

When CRISPR worked successfully on high-level cells, it became a medical breakthrough.

In June 2012, another group of scientists led by Emmanuelle Charpentier from Sweden's Umea University and Jennifer Doudna from the University of California Berkeley (UC Berkeley) published an article also using CRISPR-Cas9 technique to Successfully cut DNA in test tubes.

Zhang did not feel overwhelmed by biochemical procedures working in the test environment when failing on human real cells. Although both research groups used the CRISPR-Cas9 technique, Cong said his independent work with Zhang was quite different.

What they need to do now is just return to the race."We used to think we had a lot of time , " Cong said. But now they need to work harder. Zhang recruited more members into the lab, accumulated data and eventually published his research in Science magazine.

It was around early 2013, on the day that Zhang and Cong's article was published, another work, from the UC Berkeley team of Professor Jennifer Doudna that also used CRSPR-Cas9, published in Science magazine. This fate opened a patent patent dispute among the scientific community, between two leading US research institutions: California Berkeley University and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University.

Feng Zhang and Jennifer Doudna, two scientists who independently studied CRISPR-Cas9 works .

However, temporarily ignoring the disputes until now has not ended, continue to follow the path of Feng Zhang, what he did after declaring: "We have shown them. I can edit human genes. "

After Zhang's breakthrough, gene editing technology in particular and science in general turned to a new page. Scientific articles, where crystallizing all research results in the world, have the term CRISPR in the title increased strongly, from 90 articles in 2012 to 741 countings to 2015.

Of course, Zhang contributed to that, he published more than 38 scientific publications. Through a non-profit organization called AddGene, Zhang also provided genes and reagents for many scientists and scientists. Research facilities worldwide.

The interest in CRISPR's amazing power goes from basic research to commercialization. CRISPR appears in all media and is described as a technology of the future, discovering the greatest molecular biology in the 21st century.

Feng Zhang is currently the youngest laboratory manager at the Board Institute of MIT and Harvard.

As a pioneer in research on gene editing technology based on CRISPR, Feng Zhang is currently continuing to gain much success in this area. In 2016, he published 10 more scientific papers on gene editing, notably a CRISPR targeted RNA system called C2c2.

Zhang is currently the youngest laboratory manager at the Broad Institute, the world's leading genetic engineering research center, in collaboration with MIT and Harvard University, where he also became one of eight "professors." core ". Many postdoctoral fellows Zhang directed were much older than him.

With impressive research work on CRISPR gene editing techniques , Zhang is on the way to becoming a great scientist, a youngest wealthy businessman at MIT. It must have been an unthinkable future for Feng Zhang, every day, as a startling Asian boy arriving in Des Moines.