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Jennifer Doudna’s new push to raise roughly $1 billion to scale CRISPR-based medicine is being sold as a humanitarian mission, but it’s also the latest example of elite scientists and mega-philanthropies trying to reshape entire industries with private cash and influence. Forbes reports Doudna plans to beef up the Innovative Genomics Institute into a $100 million-a-year operation for the next decade to turn bespoke gene edits into mainstream therapies.
The life-saving, tailor-made treatment for baby KJ in Philadelphia is rightly hailed as a medical breakthrough, and conservatives should celebrate American ingenuity that saves children’s lives. That rapid success—designing and administering a CRISPR therapy in six months—shows the promise of the technology and why entrepreneurs want to scale it.
But scaling bespoke therapies into a mass-market business is not just a scientific hurdle; it is a regulatory and moral one. Startups like Aurora Therapeutics, co-founded by Doudna, have raised seed money and are trying to leverage a new FDA “plausible mechanism” pathway to push mutation-by-mutation approvals, beginning with disorders like PKU. This is innovation, yes, but it also hands enormous discretion to regulators and private firms to decide who gets access and on what terms.
We should be skeptical of the narrative that a billion-dollar plan by coastal elites will automatically put patient interests first. Doudna herself talks about access and inequality as ethical concerns, yet the obvious fix—market competition and affordable commercialization—risks getting crowded out by centralized, foundation-funded science hubs that pick winners before the market weighs in. Conservatives should demand transparency about funding, pricing, and who controls the patents and delivery technologies.
There’s also a real danger in lowering evidentiary standards in the rush to commercialize. The proposed regulatory shortcuts that allow approvals on tiny datasets may sound compassionate for rare diseases, but they create precedents that could be abused, letting expensive, barely-tested therapies roll out under commercial pressures. We can applaud life-saving success stories while insisting that safety, rigorous evidence, and informed consent remain non-negotiable.
Big Pharma and venture capital are circling—and for good reason: gene editing could be massively profitable if delivery and manufacturing scale. Deals and partnerships between CRISPR companies and established drugmakers show the commercial incentives at play, which should make conservatives wary of regulatory capture and public subsidies that primarily pad investor returns. The public deserves to know whether taxpayer-supported research will lead to affordable cures or just another windfall for well-connected investors.
At the end of the day, conservatives should root for American science that protects life and strengthens families, not for unchecked technocratic power concentrated in a few institutes and venture funds. Support bold innovation that empowers patients, preserves parental rights, and enforces real accountability for safety and pricing. Demand oversight, competition, and clarity before we hand a handful of elites the keys to rewrite human biology at scale.
