Curved Air

How sickle cell anaemia 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 ulcers covering his legs. 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 anaemia, a fatal disease that starves the body's organs of oxygen, causing excruciating pain.

In Curved Air, Kevin Davies chronicles the story of sickle cell anaemia from its ancient origins in Sub-Saharan Africa to its central role in the development of human genome editing, revealing how one of the world's most famous genetic diseases became its most neglected. Sickle cell anaemia was the first disease to be attributed to a molecular anomaly and the first to be diagnosed prenatally with DNA testing. Yet for decades, patients, many of whom are Black, were denied lifesaving care by health providers quick to dismiss them as drug seekers. It was only after a group of researchers in the US and Europe partnered with biotech companies, physicians, and their patients that hope arrived in the form of a revolutionary gene-editing therapy: CRISPR.

A story of failure and breakthroughs, heartbreak and hope, Curved Air is a celebration of the scientists, physicians, and patients who are finally catching a glimpse of the cure they've waited generations to see.