Fyodor Urnov at Sangamo BioSciences helped coin the phrase "genome editing," is a foremost expert in zinc finger nucleases and a popular speaker who mooonlights as an adjunct at the University of California, Berkeley. The child of a linguist and a literary critic, Urnov tells chief science correspondent Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay about growing up in Soviet-era Russia, how reading "The Double Helix" as a kid fueled a passion for DNA that has never cooled, and what it means to now see DNA as a druggable target in his research on blood diseases.
