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Portrait of Jennifer Doudna

Science · Biology

Jennifer Doudna

born 1964 · American

Biochemistry; RNA biology and gene editing

Jennifer Doudna is an American biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012, with the French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, she showed that the bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 system could be reprogrammed to cut DNA at chosen sites, creating a precise and cheap tool for editing genomes. The pair shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first science Nobel shared only by women.

How to spot them

  • ▸CRISPR-Cas9 'genetic scissors'; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 with Emmanuelle Charpentier
  • ▸University of California, Berkeley; founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute
  • ▸Subject of Walter Isaacson's 'The Code Breaker' (2021)
  • ▸Grew up in Hilo, Hawaii

Key discoveries & works

CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing (with Emmanuelle Charpentier) (2012)

Showed that Cas9 guided by an RNA molecule can be programmed to cut any chosen DNA sequence

A Crack in Creation (2017)

Book, co-written with Samuel Sternberg, on gene editing and its ethical implications

Founding of the Innovative Genomics Institute (2014)

Berkeley–UCSF research institute applying genome editing to health and agriculture

Crystal structure of a group I ribozyme domain (1996)

Early landmark work on the 3D structure of catalytic RNA

Key ideas

  • CRISPR, a bacterial immune system against viruses, can be turned into a programmable gene-editing tool
  • Called for caution and a moratorium on heritable human germline editing

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Washington, D.C., in 1964; grew up in Hilo, Hawaii
  • •Took her PhD at Harvard under Jack Szostak, a later Nobel laureate
  • •Shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier 'for the development of a method for genome editing'
  • •The 2020 chemistry prize was the first science Nobel awarded solely to women
  • •Other honours include the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2015), the Japan Prize (2017), the Kavli Prize (2018) and the Wolf Prize in Medicine (2020)
  • •Awarded the American Chemical Society's Priestley Medal for 2026
  • •Berkeley was involved in a long patent dispute over CRISPR with the Broad Institute (Feng Zhang)

Drill it — 6 cards

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Sources