CRISPR'd

For fans of Julia Buckley and Tess Gerritsen, a debut featuring a killer in plain sight using a microscopic murder weapon, the cutting edge gene-editing technology: CRISPR.

Boston geneticist Dr. Saul Kramer is on the cutting edge of genetic disease research. Revered among clients at his IVF clinic, he harbors a dark secret. In addition to helping infertile couples conceive healthy babies, Dr. Kramer is obsessed, for his own dark reasons, with an alternate mission as well. In certain patients, he uses the gene editing technology CRISPR to tamper with embryos, not to improve the health of the embryos, but to replace a healthy gene with a deadly mutation. A young female journalist, Sammie Fuller, begins to suspect what he has done when three infants conceived at his clinic die mysteriously, all at about one year old. She and a molecular biologist work secretly in his MIT lab to identify any genetic defects in the deceased children and together make a chilling discovery. Thanks to Sammie's blockbuster stories, which go viral, Dr. Kramer is charged with murder and winds up in court. In the subsequent dramatic court scenes, his feisty defense lawyer stuns the world with her defense. Set in this uneasy time of genetic engineering with CRISPR technology, Foreman, spins a compelling tale of love, revenge, and murder.

Auteur

Judy Foreman is a former Boston Globe health columnist and the author of THREE works of nonfiction. A Wellesley College grad (Phi Beta Kappa), She spent three years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil and has a Masters from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was a Lecturer on Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Fellow in Medical Ethics, also at Harvard Medical School, a Knight Science Fellow at MIT and a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. She has won more than 50 journalism awards including a George Foster Peabody Award and a Science In Society award from the National Association of Science Writers. She lives outside of Boston. CRISPR'd is her first novel.