Medicine Grand Rounds Highlights

Collaborating with Emmanuelle Charpentier, Doudna transformed this bacterial defense into CRISPR-Cas9, a tool that can edit any gene by swapping its RNA “guide.”

Genetic Medicine Comes to Life

In 2023, CRISPR reached the clinic with the first FDA-approved therapy for sickle cell disease. The patient, Victoria Gray, went from constant pain to living symptom-free for six years after receiving her own CRISPR-edited stem cells.

“Meeting her brought home what this technology can mean,” Doudna said. “It’s not just molecules in a lab. It’s mothers being able to care for their kids again.”

The Next Frontier

Doudna shared the story of “baby KJ,” born with a rare metabolic disorder and treated in 2024 with a custom CRISPR therapy built in months — a glimpse of personalized, rapid-response medicine.

Still, challenges remain: delivery, access, and cost. Doudna urged continued innovation to make gene editing more equitable.

“CRISPR began as a curiosity in yogurt bacteria,” she said. “Now, it’s rewriting the future of medicine — and the story is only beginning.”

Lembke explored the “plenty paradox”: as wealth and access rise, rates of depression, anxiety, and overdose have surged. Technology, she argued, has “drugified” daily life, making nearly everything—from food to media—more potent and harder to resist. Yet she also offered hope. Through intentional abstinence, mindfulness, movement, and what she calls “healthy doses of pain,” individuals can restore equilibrium and rediscover joy in ordinary experiences.

She concluded with a reflection on shame and honesty in recovery, emphasizing that telling the truth—first to oneself, then to others—reawakens the brain’s capacity for control and connection. “What goes up must come down,” she reminded the audience. “To find balance, we must sometimes lean into discomfort.”

What We Don’t Measure

Kleinman argued that modern systems prize institutional efficiency over quality of care. We track throughput and billing, but not time spent listening, clarity of communication, clinical judgment, or the healing power of the physical exam’s “laying on of hands.” He sees technology, including AI, as a potential ally only if it augments rather than replaces human presence (e.g., liberating clinicians from screens so they can face patients).

Training the Next Clinician

Students often enter medical school strong in empathy and curiosity and graduate weaker in both, he warned: a cultural failure, not a scientific one. He urged departments to place master clinicians at the bedside as primary teachers and to build habits and rituals of care into daily practice.

Kleinman closed with the charge he shared with his late colleague Paul Farmer: when confronted with suffering and equipped with tools to help, ACT. “Care,” he said, “is the moral heart of medicine. It’s time we treat it that way.”

Her approach focuses on developing women-centered, context-appropriate models of cancer care through workforce development, policy reform, and primary care training. She highlighted the need to integrate oncology into broader health systems and to move beyond external aid toward sustainable, locally led solutions. “True progress,” she said, “means moving from dependency to partnership, where countries define and drive their own health priorities.”

The lectureship commemorates Brooke Peterson Gabster, MD, who joined Stanford’s residency program in 2018 with a commitment to improving health systems both locally and globally. Before her death from metastatic osteosarcoma in 2021, she worked to expand access to care for marginalized populations and envisioned a career bridging clinical medicine and policy.

Mutebi’s address reflected that same vision — anchored in data, equity, and humanity. She closed with an African proverb that captured the spirit of the day: “When women rise, communities heal.”

His team’s innovations include large-scale bioreactors to grow stem-cell aggregates by the billions, multi-nozzle printers that can print 32 tissues simultaneously, and an “omni-printer” capable of approaching tissue from multiple directions, mimicking surgical precision. Their prototypes already include vascularized cardiac tissue that beats in unison and silicone heart valves that open and close under simulated flow.

While immense challenges remain — from immune responses to scaling and cell maturation — Scott’s vision is clear: each experiment brings medicine one tangible step closer to building a living, beating human heart.