⁍ French-American Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer Doudna win the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
⁍ They developed the CRISPR/Cas9 tool to edit the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with precision.
⁍ Charpentier, 51, and Doudna, 56, become the sixth and seventh women to win a Nobel for chemistry, joining Marie Curie, who won in 1911, and more recently, Frances Arnold, in 2018.
⁍ It is the first time since 1964, when Britain’s Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin alone won the award, that no men are among the chemistry prize winners.
– Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier are this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work developing a tool that can edit the DNA of organisms, Reuters reports. “The ability to cut the DNA where you want has revolutionized the life sciences,” says Pernilla Wittung Stafshede of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the winners Wednesday. Doudna, 56, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Charpentier, 51, of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, will share the $1.1 million prize. The tool they developed, CRISPR/Cas9, “can not only snip DNA at the right spot, but also repair the join so that errors do not creep in,” Stafshede says. “The beauty of CRISPR/Cas9 is that it can not only snip DNA at the right spot, but also repair the join so that errors do not creep in. Today CRISPR/Cas9 is a common tool in biochemistry and molecular biology labs—used to make crops more resistent to drought or develop novel treatments of hereditary diseases such as sickle-cell anaemia,” the Guardian reports. “What started as a curiosity-driven, fundamental discovery project has now become the breakthrough strategy used by countless researchers working to help improve the human condition,” Doudna says in a statement.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/nobel-prize-chemistry-int/creators-of-gene-scissors-clinch-nobel-as-women-sweep-chemistry-idUSKBN26S1RN