You, like most people, might never have heard about Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats gene editing, or CRISPR gene editing for short. This is a recently discovered gene editing technique (a methodology that allows to modify the genetic information of an organism) in the field of molecular biology that earned Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. It is only the sixth and seventh Nobel Prize to be awarded to women in the field of chemistry, the first shared by two women, and it recognizes Doudna and Charpentier’s long and fruitful career in science.

Born in Washington D.C in 1964, but raised in Hawaii, Jennifer Doudna’s life is one defined by breakthrough achievements in science, education and activism. In a recent biography on Doudna by Walter Isaacson – known for the biographies of Elon Musk or Steve Jobs – she narrated what it was like to grow up on an island and attend a school where she was the only blond, blue-eyed kid. Surrounded by nature, her interest in biology first and in genetics later became an obvious choice for her educational background. Thankfully, her choice was very much encouraged by her parents, both with careers in teaching. Doudna first truly realized she could “do science” in 1985, during college practices, when she was mentioned in a scientific paper about bacteria after successfully growing the organisms.

Encouraged again by her parents, she applied and got accepted into Harvard that same year. It was there, working in the laboratories of different distinguished professors in the field, that she discovered her passion for DNA first and RNA later. After finishing her dissertation, she asked Polish biologist and a later Nobel Prize laureate Jack Szostak to do her doctoral research under his supervision. Investigating RNA at a time where major discoveries in DNA were still being made was risky, especially for Doudna who was only just starting her career in science. “Never do something that a thousand other people are doing”, a guiding principle for Szostak, convinced Doudna of embarking into the scientific journey of RNA research.

During her PhD, she published various important and novel articles in prestigious scientific magazines. It made sense, then, to continue her research and after obtaining her PhD, Doudna started her postdoctoral research in Tomas Cech’s lab, then recently laureated with the Nobel Prize. Despite moving from the University of Colorado to Yale, she kept investigating the RNA molecular structure until Doudna and Cech were finally able to determine the location of every atom in an RNA molecule. This discovery, essential for the Nobel Prize she would end up winning later, began a “quest to translate basic science about RNA into a tool that could edit genes”, Isaacson explained in Doudna’s biography.

Now a leading figure in a newly established field, Doudna continued to work at Yale until 2002. Afterwards, she felt it was time for a change and moved to Berkeley to both continue her research on RNA as well as teach classes, as this way she could contribute to public higher education in the U.S. It was during the early 2000s when Doudna became interested in the recently discovered CRISPR mechanism and in the genetic editing technique associated to CRISPR that she would contribute to discover.

Explained in layman terms,CRISPR gene editing is a tool used by scientists to, as redundant as it sounds, edit genes and consequently change them. Think of genes as the instruction manuals for all living things. They sometimes present problems that could result in diseases or other genetic related issues. CRISPR is then the figurate scissors that make it possible to cut those specific parts out of the manual and add new instructions that fix the mistakes. Think of it like editing a document on a computer. CRISPR allows scientists to make changes to the genetic code of living things, like correcting spelling mistakes or adding new sentences to improve the document. But the implications and possibilities of CRISPR gene editing go beyond correcting spelling mistakes in a Word document.

In 2008 Doudna began her entrepreneurial journey when she briefly started to work for Genentech, a biotechnology corporation. Her jump to the corporate world followed the conviction that it was there where she would be able to investigate concrete CRISPR techniques to actually help people suffering from illnesses and genetic diseases. After working for Genentech, an experience she did not particularly enjoy, she moved back to academia. Since then, Doudna has founded over 4 companies and she is now on the advisory board of different businesses and foundations mainly focused in CRISPR therapeutic gene editing applications. Although she “didn’t have the right skill set or passions to work at a big company”, creating her own companies and advising others became the way to maintain a healthy relationship between corporatism, activism, research and academia.

In 2011, while attending a conference in Puerto Rico, Doudna met Emmanuelle Charpentier. Charpentier, a French researcher in microbiology, genetics and biochemistry who had also been doing intensive investigations on CRISPR. Their match happened instantly, as Doudna recalls in her biography, and soon after the conference they started working together. A research journey of sweat and tears would, in 2020, be recognized by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to both women. Their discovery was also part of a race amongst different scientific teams around the world trying to prove that CRISPR techniques could be used for genetic editing in humans. Throughout her life, and prior to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Doudna received prestigious recognitions such as, among others, the Princesa de Asturias award in 2015 or the Tang and Kavli prizes in 2016 and 2018, respectively.

The discovery, which was made by different scientific teams almost simultaneously, had broader implications. The possibility of editing the human genome had now become a probability and one with many ethical issues behind. Although a big part of the scientific community, amongst them Doudna, are speaking out in favor of a moratorium on the use of this technique, scientific teams around the world have already begun to use it experimentally on humans. In a future where “free-market eugenics” will be possible, we need scientists like Doudna, who in the vanguard of discovery maintain responsibility over the dangers of the field and recognize the importance of policies regulating it. Other uses of CRISPR, generally more accepted and that are being researched, also by Doudna and her companies, include enhancing crops in agriculture or diagnosing genetic disorders in humans which could eventually help to make us less vulnerable to Alzheimer, cancer or future pandemics.

When COVID-19 kept the world secluded, Doudna worked with an international team to find ways in which CRISPR and RNA editing could be useful for detecting and then curing the disease. Their investigation ran parallel to hundreds of teams around the world until in 2020 the first two RNA vaccines, a recognition of the hard work of the global scientific community, were approved by the U.S. and other governments. Shortly after Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize for CRISPR editing.

Doudna is now the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair Professor at the University of California, Berkley and carries on her research for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She continues to work in her companies, such as Mammoth Biosciences and advises some big pharmaceuticals such as Johnson & Johnson. She also keeps calling for funding on scientific research and leads the Doudna Lab, a groundbreaking institution in CRISPR gene editing and its applications.

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About the Author

_{Dario is a student in American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He has previously completed a bachelor in History at the University of Zaragoza and bachelor in Communication at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. During his bachelor years, he also had the chance to study abroad in countries such as the U.S., Italy or Romania, which have made him specially interested in transnational movements and perspectives. He is currently writing a dissertation on the unpublished autobiography of Vaughn Love, one of the African Americans who fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. In his free time, Dario is also a member of the Young Minds Network of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam.}

_{For more information about the Young Adams Institute, check out https://www.john-adams.nl/.}