Jennifer Doudna
Jennifer Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing CRISPR-Cas9, a method of editing DNA that is cheap, precise and simple enough to have spread through biology within a few years. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1964 and raised in Hilo, Hawaii, where her father taught literature, she read The Double Helix as a child and decided that the structure of life was a problem she could work on. She took a degree at Pomona College and a doctorate at Harvard under Jack Szostak, working on RNA, and did postdoctoral work with Thomas Cech at Colorado on the crystal structure of a ribozyme — an RNA molecule that acts as an enzyme. Her early career was structural biology, not gene editing. She moved to Berkeley in 2002 and began investigating CRISPR sequences in bacteria after a colleague suggested them. These turned out to be an adaptive immune system: bacteria store fragments of viral DNA and use them to guide a nuclease to cut matching sequences. Working with Emmanuelle Charpentier, who had identified the RNA component, she showed in a 2012 paper that the system could be simplified into two parts and programmed with a guide RNA to cut any chosen DNA sequence. That was the step that turned a bacterial curiosity into a universal tool. A lengthy patent dispute followed with the Broad Institute over its application in mammalian cells. She has been consistently public about the ethics, convening a moratorium discussion on heritable editing in 2015 and condemning He Jiankui's 2018 creation of edited babies. CRISPR therapies for sickle cell disease were approved in 2023.
- Lived: 1964 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: biochemist, scientist, ethicist
