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CRISPR Pioneers Recognized With a Nobel Prize in Chemistry
As Future Human’s resident biotech reporter, I was thrilled by the news this morning that Jennifer Doudna, PhD, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, PhD, had been honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work developing the genome-editing system CRISPR. The award is historic because it’s the first time that an all-women team has won a Nobel Prize for any science.
Often described as “molecular scissors,” CRISPR allows scientists to precisely delete and edit DNA in virtually any living thing — including humans. Hailed as a breakthrough, it has opened up countless possibilities for treating intractable diseases and improving the food we eat.
“It’s still early days, but this is a technology with great promise,” said Claes Gustafsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee, speaking in an interview after the announcement on Wednesday.
Doudna, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Charpentier, now at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, began collaborating in 2011. Their goal: unlock the mysteries of CRISPR — curious repeating segments of DNA found naturally in bacteria that protect against viral invaders. In 2012, they published a seminal paper in the journal Science describing how this innate immune system can be reprogrammed to recognize and slice out any genetic sequence, making it an…
