The landmark Clean Air Act (CAA) turns 50 this month, and its impact has been dramatic: Ambient measures of pollutants have fallen more than 90% in some areas, and improvements in air quality are credited with preventing hundreds of thousands of premature deaths.

On the morning that University of California, Berkeley, professor Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, her first stop after a 7 a.m. press conference and subsequent media interviews was her campus lab in the Innovative Genomics Institute. When she exited the elevator with her family at 10:30 a.m., she was greeted by dozens of graduate students and lab staff, while several dozen current and former lab members joined in via Zoom.

CRISPR-Cas9 makes it easy to knock out or tweak a single gene to determine its effect on an organism or cell, or even another gene. But what if you could perform several thousand experiments at once, using CRISPR to tweak every gene in the genome individually and quickly see the impact of each?