Fiat Vox

At 3 months old, Victoria Gray wouldn’t stop crying. Blood tests brought devastating news: she had sickle cell disease, a genetic blood disorder that blocks blood flow and oxygen delivery to the body. It causes unbearable pain that Victoria describes as “getting struck by lightning and hit by a truck.”As she got older, Victoria felt increasingly isolated and hopeless. She often spent her kids’ birthdays at the hospital, where she received regular blood transfusions. “I felt like I was cheating my children out of their childhood,” she says. “I didn’t look forward to a long life. I stopped dreaming. I gave up on school or doing anything … I thought that I was close to dying.”But at age 34, Victoria got a new chance at life. In 2019, she became the first person in the world to receive a revolutionary new treatment for the disease — a gene-editing tool called CRISPR discovered in a UC Berkeley lab, which would go on to win a Nobel Prize just one year later. “It felt like an answered prayer for me,” says