Nobel Prize Honors Jennifer Doudna for CRISPR Discovery

UC Berkeley has long been a leader in producing Nobel Prize laureates. In October, biochemist Jennifer Doudna became the latest, winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Doudna shares the prize with colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier for the co-development of CRISPR-Cas9, a revolutionary genome-editing tool.

CRISPR-Cas9 allows scientists to rewrite DNA in any organism, including humans, with unprecedented efficiency and precision. The groundbreaking power and versatility of CRISPR-Cas9 have opened up new and wide-ranging possibilities across biology, agriculture, and medicine.

Doudna’s attention was first drawn to CRISPR by geomicrobiologist Jill Banfield—a professor in ESPM and the Department of Earth and Planetary Science—who encountered it while studying bacteria that live in extreme environments. Banfield reached out to Doudna in 2006 and, during a meeting at the campus’s Free Speech Movement Café, sketched a diagram for her that outlined Banfield’s understanding of CRISPR.

Today, the women are leaders in their fields. Banfield serves as the scientific director of microbiology research at the Innovative Genomics Institute, which Doudna leads. Charpentier is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology. She and Doudna are the first women to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences together, which sends the message, Doudna said, that “women rock.”

— Adapted from an article by Robert Sanders