Nobel prize in chemistry awarded to 2 scientists for work on genome editing

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was jointly awarded Wednesday to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for their 2012 work on CRISPR-Cas9, a method to edit DNA. The announcement marks the first time the award has gone to two women.

“This year’s prize is about rewriting the code of life,” Goran K. Hansson, secretarygeneral of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said as he announced the names of the laureates.

Charpentier and Doudna, only the sixth and seventh women in history to win a chemistry prize, did much of the pioneering work to turn molecules made by microbes into a tool for customizing genes — whether in microbes, plants, animals or even humans.

“I’m over the moon; I’m in shock,” Doudna, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said at a news conference Wednesday.

It has been only eight years since Doudna and Charpentier — now the director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin — co-authored their first paper demonstrating the power of CRISPR-Cas9.

Since then, the technology has exploded. Doctors are testing it as a cure for genetic disorders such as sickle cell disease and hereditary blindness. Plant scientists are using it to create new crops. Some researchers are even trying to use CRISPR to bring species back from extinction.

Along with these highprofile experiments, other scientists are using CRISPR to ask fundamental questions about life, such as which genes are essential to a cell’s survival. CRISPR “solves problems in every field of biology,” said Angela Zhou, an information scientist at CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society.

“This technology has utterly transformed the way we do research in basic science,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “I am thrilled to see CRISPR-Cas getting the recognition we have all been waiting for, and seeing two women being recognized as Nobel Laureates.”

Jinelle Wint, assistant dean for academic affairs at Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri, described this year’s prize as a “historic win,” both because of its recognition of a revolutionary advancement in biomedical science, as well as its championing of women scientists.

Aspiring female scientists, Wint said, should be empowered to think “that they, too, can be in the next Nobel Prize winners of the future.”