How sickle cell anemia led the quest to edit the human genome while patients endured decades of racial discrimination and medical neglect.

In December 1904, Walter Clement Noel, a dental student from Grenada, was admitted to a Chicago hospital with fever, jaundiced eyes, and leg ulcers. When doctors examined his blood under a microscope, they were puzzled by his sickle-shaped cells. His case became enshrined in the annals of medicine as the first report of sickle cell anemia, a life-threatening disease that starves the body’s organs of oxygen, causing excruciating pain.

In Curved Air, Kevin Davies chronicles the story of sickle cell anemia from its ancient origins in Sub-Saharan Africa to its surprising role in the success of human genome editing, revealing how one of the world’s most famous genetic diseases was also among its most neglected. Scientists discovered the molecular anomaly responsible for the disease over 75 years ago. Yet for decades, patients, many of them Black, suffered in silence, denied urgent care by a healthcare system quick to dismiss them as drug seekers. It was only in 2023, after researchers in the US and Europe partnered with biotech companies, that hope arrived in the approval of a revolutionary gene editing therapy: CRISPR.

Giving voice to the sickle cell pioneers, including Victoria Gray, who bravely became the first volunteer to have her blood cells engineered, Curved Air is at once a story of failure and breakthroughs, heartbreak and hope. It is also a celebration of the scientists, physicians, and, above all, the patients who are finally catching a glimpse of the cure they have waited generations to see.
 
Contributor Bio(s)
 
 
Kevin Davies is the Executive Editor of the CRISPR Journal and the founding editor of Nature Genetics. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, he is the author or coauthor of Editing Humanity, Cracking the Genome, The $1,000 Genome, and DNA. Kevin Davies lives in Washington DC.