The story begins in 2006, when microbiologist Jillian Banfield introduced biochemist Jennifer Doudna to a strange bacterial immune system called CRISPR. Six years later, Doudna and French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier published the landmark 2012 paper demonstrating that CRISPR-Cas9 could be programmed to cut DNA at precise locations, a discovery that earned them the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. By March 2014, Doudna had announced the formation of the Innovative Genomics Initiative, a partnership between UC Berkeley and UCSF aimed at turning that basic science into medical and agricultural applications. The Li Ka Shing Foundation and both universities provided early funding. The initiative officially launched on February 4, 2015, and relaunched in January 2017 as the Innovative Genomics Institute, moving into its current building on the Berkeley campus with an expanded mandate that now included plants and agriculture.

On March 9, 2020, UC Berkeley suspended in-person classes and began shutting down campus buildings. Four days later, Doudna gathered her leadership team not to discuss closing the IGI but to discuss what it could do instead. Within days the institute had converted its laboratories into a COVID-19 diagnostic testing facility, processing samples for the campus community, first responders, and underserved populations in surrounding cities. The lab would ultimately handle more than 600,000 patient samples. Meanwhile, the Nobel Committee called. Unable to travel to Stockholm because of the pandemic, Doudna accepted the Nobel Prize in Chemistry from her home in Berkeley, and the IGI building hosted the celebration. It was a year that captured the institute's character: when confronted with a crisis, it pivoted rather than paused.

The IGI's research has pushed well beyond Cas9. Scientists there have discovered ultra-compact editing proteins like CasX, CasY, and CasPhi in some of the world's smallest microbes and largest bacteriophages, expanding the genome-editing toolkit in ways popular science reporting dubbed "CRISPR 2.0." On the human health side, the institute helped develop an experimental CRISPR-based sickle cell therapy that received FDA approval for clinical trials in 2021, part of a consortium with UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital and UCLA's Broad Stem Cell Research Center. After a 2018 meeting with US senators raised concerns about the cost of such treatments, Doudna made affordability a core part of the IGI's mission. The agricultural program, led by Brian Staskawicz, has developed CRISPR protocols for editing over thirty crop species, including removing toxic cyanide precursors from cassava and improving drought tolerance in rice.

In 2022, the IGI turned its attention to climate change. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative committed eleven million dollars to support research on using CRISPR to enhance the carbon-sequestration abilities of plants and soils. A year later, at the 2023 TED conference in Vancouver, the institute was selected by the Audacious Project and received seventy million dollars to develop microbiome-editing tools targeting two specific problems: methane emissions from livestock and childhood asthma. The ambition is characteristic of the IGI's approach, taking a technology born in a Berkeley laboratory and asking how far it can reach. UC Berkeley announced plans in October 2023 to build a new downtown innovation zone with laboratory buildings to give the institute room to grow. From a single conversation about bacterial immune systems to personalized gene therapies for newborns, the distance traveled is extraordinary, and the IGI is still accelerating.