UC Berkeley’s Jennifer A. Doudna and French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for making one of the most monumental discoveries in biology: a cheap, fast, precise and powerful tool to “edit” DNA, known as CRISPR.
The gene-editing tool gives scientists near godlike power, allowing them to rewrite the code of life by moving genes from one living creature to another. Easily deployable, in merely eight years it has transformed research in plant and animal breeding, treatment for hereditary disease and new strategies for combating infectious disease and cancer. Most recently, it was enlisted to create a super-fast test to detect COVID-19 infection.
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2020 #NobelPrize in Chemistry has been awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna “for the development of a method for genome editing.” pic.twitter.com/CrsnEuSwGD— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2020
Doudna, who is the chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UC Berkeley, has become a leader in the responsible use of the tool, seeking to fend off a dystopian future in which scientists create an elite population of designer babies with enhanced intelligence, beauty or other traits.
Doudna and Charpentier are the first all-women team to win science’s highest honor.
“Many women think that, no matter what they do, their work will never be recognized the way it would be if they were a man,” said Doudna. “And I think (this prize) refutes that. It makes a strong statement that women can do science, women can do chemistry, and that great science is recognized and honored.”
In a Wednesday morning press briefing, Doudna credited the San Francisco Bay Area with encouraging her to “dream big and swing for the fences,” adding that her research thrived through collaboration “with other great universities, and also the extraordinary culture that exists in Silicon Valley.”
It offers sweet justice during a contentious and long-running patent battle over the use of CRISPR. Last month, the nation’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board ruled against UC Berkeley, saying that a group led by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has “priority” in its already granted patents for uses of the original CRISPR system in human and animal cells — a finding that, when applied to medicine, could be worth millions of dollars.
The Nobel Prize rewards the fundamental intellectual discovery made by Doudna and Charpentier. In contrast, the Broad Institute’s research focuses on its application in humans.
The recipients were announced Wednesday in Stockholm by Goran Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Doudna said she went to bed on Tuesday night with her phone on ‘silent’ mode, with no thought of the potential prize.
When the call came from Sweden, “I was deeply asleep,” she said. Finally, she was awakened at 2:53 a.m. by the phone’s persistent buzzing. A reporter on the line asked if she could comment on the Nobel.
“Who won it?” Doudna asked. Startled by the news, she reached out to colleagues, “and I was very glad to know it wasn’t all a big joke.”
It was UC Berkeley’s second Nobel Prize in as many days, after the committee honored professor emeritus Reinhard Genzel and UCLA physics and astronomy professor Andrea Ghez for their breakthroughs in understanding the mysteries of cosmic black holes.
“This great honor recognizes the history of CRISPR and the collaborative story of harnessing it into a profoundly powerful engineering technology that gives new hope and possibility to our society,” Doudna said Wednesday. “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.”
The Doudna-Charpentier team didn’t conceive of the discovery out of thin air, rather, they discovered it in nature.
On campus in 2005, Doudna was intrigued by a thoughtful conversation with environmental researcher Jillian Banfield, who described an obscure trait of microbes: unusual repeating sequences of DNA called “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” or CRISPR. It served as the microbes’ immune system, helping them recognize and kill viruses, Banfield told her.
At a scientific conference in Puerto Rico six years later, she met Charpentier, a French microbiologist then at Umea University in Sweden, who was already making important discoveries about microbes’ use of CRISPR.
Walking the streets of old San Juan, a partnership was formed. In a eureka moment, the two scientists realized that microbes’ defense system could be enlisted to edit genomes, not just kill viruses.
They demonstrated a way to use CRISPR to slice up any DNA sequence they choose — then add or subtract pieces.
CRISPR-Cas9 isn’t the first gene-editing method. But it is much faster, cheaper, easier and more accurate than earlier versions.
“It’s like the Model T — not the first car but the one that changed the world,” Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford Law School, told this news organization in an article about pioneering research in the Bay Area.
Doudna’s discovery in 2012 galvanized the medical community — and now, CRISPR is moving out of test tubes and toward testing in humans, with clinical trials for various diseases such as sickle cell anemia, blindness, muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis and neurodegeneration.
It is also being used in basic research, such as understanding the genetics of butterflies’ wing patterns and human bipedalism.
Its profound implications present science with boundless opportunities — but also once-unthinkable ethical quandaries.
Those sci-fi fears arose in late 2018 when a Chinese researcher announced he had altered the DNA of at least two embryos to create the world’s first genetically edited babies.
The scandal rocked the world of genetics and has weighed heavily on the future of a technology that could save the life of an individual patient but also change the genetic code of future generations, redirecting evolution in new, permanent and unimaginable ways.
In 2015, Doudna convened a meeting in Napa that addressed, for the first time, the potential for human genome editing using CRISPR. This led to an influential paper in the journal Science, followed by a statement calling for caution and public input by the National Academy of Sciences.
“She sincerely cares about the ethical issues,” said Stanford’s Greely, a prominent medical and scientific ethics expert.
Even while conducting world-class science, “she has continued to be very active on the regulation and control of CRISPR’s use in humans. I applaud her for that commitment.”
She also serves as president and chair of the board of the Innovative Genomics Institute. Wednesday’s honor from the Nobel committee was not entirely unexpected, Doudna’s work has been celebrated in the scientific community for years.
Jennifer Doudna wins 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry!
The groundbreaking power & versatility of CRISPR-Cas9 has opened up new & wide-ranging possibilities across biology, agriculture & medicine, including the treatment of thousands of intractable diseases. https://t.co/6uz4viJStm
— UC Berkeley (@UCBerkeley) October 7, 2020
Since their discovery, Doudna and Charpentier have formed competing startup companies. Doudna co-founded Caribou Biosciences Inc., Intellia Therapeutics Inc. and Mammoth Biosciences to work on CRISPR-based diagnostics and therapeutics. Dr. Charpentier, who now directs the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Germany, helped start Crispr Therapeutics.
The scientists remain friends, but no longer collaborate on research. Charpentier now focuses her research on a deeper exploration of microbes’ use of CRISPR in fighting off viral invaders.
Doudna grew up in Hilo, Hawaii, where her father taught literature at the University of Hawaii campus and gave her a copy of The Double Helix by James Watson when she was in sixth grade. As a tall blue-eyed blond, she has described feeling different from her Polynesian and Asian classmates, and sought out the books and science. Hawaii’s exotic plants and animals also created a sense of curiosity about how nature works.
After studying biochemistry at Pomona College in California, she went to Harvard for graduate school, then served as an assistant professor at Yale. She moved to Berkeley in 2002.
Doudna lives in Berkeley with her husband, Jamie Cate, a UC Berkeley professor who studies protein synthesis and renewable energy. Their son Andrew is a freshman at UC Berkeley.”]
The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million krona (more than $1.1 million), courtesy of a bequest left more than a century ago by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The amount was increased recently to adjust for inflation.
On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine to Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus. Genzel and Ghez shared half of Tuesday’s prize for physics with Roger Penrose of Britain.
The other prizes are for outstanding work in the fields of literature, peace and economics.
Associated Press contributed to this report. Check back for more on this developing story.
