Profile of Dana Carroll

Abstract

University of Utah biochemist Dana Carroll was among the first scientists to develop reagents for genome editing. These tools can make site-specific double-strand DNA breaks to stimulate desired recombination and repair. The technology that Carroll spearheaded, zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs), laid the groundwork for other genome-editing platforms, such as transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) and clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR-Cas9). In his Inaugural Article (1), Carroll, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017, explores a limitation of CRISPR-Cas9. The results could inform DNA target selection for genome editing in agricultural, medical, and other research applications. Dana Carroll. Image courtesy of University of Utah Health. Carroll was born into a family of scientists. His grandfather, William Ernest Carroll, was a student of animal nutrition at the University of Illinois and contributed to the then-emerging field of animal science. A member of the Utah Agricultural College, W. E. Carroll conducted research on animal husbandry. Several of his influential papers and books on the subject, such as Swine Production (2), remain in circulation. Carroll’s father, William Robert Carroll, conducted research on protein chemistry at the National Institutes of Health for more than two decades. “Many of our family friends were other NIH scientists and their families, but there was little discussion in our house or in social gatherings about science per se,” Carroll says. “I only really learned about my father’s research interests and those of his colleagues when I was in graduate school. If my upbringing had an influence on my career choices, it was indirect.” As a youth, Carroll was interested in mathematics and science. Undaunted by what he describes as a “crushingly boring” high school chemistry class, Carroll chose to major in chemistry at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in …