Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to First All-Female Team for CRISPR Gene Editing

Jennifer Doudna was sound asleep when her phone began buzzing, so she missed the first few calls. When the incessant ringing finally roused her at 3 a.m., it was a reporter who wanted her reaction to the just-awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry. “Who won?” Doudna asked. “It was a little embarrassing,” Doudna said during a press conference held later in the day when the reporter told her she had been given the prestigious award, along with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier from the Max Planck Institute. “I was really deeply asleep.” Doudna and Charpentier were jointly awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of CRISPR-Cas9, a genome editing technology that allows scientists to deftly edit DNA from virtually any living thing with a precision and ease never before possible. Since they described the technology in 2012, they and other researchers have studied CRISPR for use in possible treatments for human diseases ranging from cancer to HIV as well as in agriculture for ways to make plants drought and pest resistant. Doudna and Charpentier are the first all-female winners of the Chemistry Prize, and Doudna is the first female faculty member at University of California, Berkeley to earn the honor. The news was such a shock that Doudna thought the reporter on the phone had been joking—until she answered a second call early Wednesday morning. It was from her former post-doctoral fellow Martin Jinek, who conducted man...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news