"I am proud of my gender": Two women scientists make history by sharing 2020's Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Jennifer A Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California at Berkeley, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, a French microbiologist, have made history this year by becoming the first women to jointly win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the sixth and seventh women to do so individually. The duo were awarded for their ground-breaking discovery, known as ‘Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats’, or the CRISPR-Cas9 genetic scissors. The revolutionary gene-editing tool can be used to precisely edit the DNA of plants, animals and microorganisms, and therefore has the potential to be used not just in cancer therapy, but possibly also to cure inherited diseases.

Expressing her happiness and gratitude, Doudna revealed at a conference at the University of California at Berkeley, “I’m over the moon, I’m in shock, I couldn’t be happier,” and also used the ooportunity to share an empowering message with the world. “I’m proud of my gender. It’s great for especially younger women to see this… that women’s work is recognised.” Unable to join her friends for a celebration in person due to COVID-19, she also said that she and Charpentier are “waving to each other across the Atlantic right now.”

The conversation around the CRISPR tool first began in 2012, with the publication of a research paper, which has been called ‘one of the most cited studies in modern science.’ Being more efficient and less complex than earlier studies around the same topic, this one was especially important for present as well as future research, evident in the fact that this tool will now be widely deployed in research laboratories. Because the CRISPR tool comes with the simple ‘Cut-Copy-Paste’ mechanism, like what one would find in a basic word processor, it can easily understand and follow functions like find-and-replace, find-and-delete, and just find. It is due to this that the tool has become a mainstay already. In the words of Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, “If you walk into any lab, including mine at NIH, there’s a very high likelihood that CRISPR-Cas is in the middle of those experiments.” 

Having already received multiple accolades in the past for their research, such as the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015) and the Canada Gairdner International Award (2016), for scientists Doudna and Charpentier, a Nobel Prize marks one more win in a journey that shows no signs of slowing down. To understand exactly how the CRISPR tool works, watch this.

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