Jennifer Doudna

Jennifer Doudna (born February 19, 1964, Washington, D.C.) is an American biochemist best known for her discovery, with French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, of a molecular tool known as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9. The discovery of CRISPR-Cas9, made in 2012, provided the foundation for gene editing, enabling researchers to make specific changes to DNA sequences in a way that was far more efficient and technically simpler than earlier methods. Using the CRISPR-Cas9 system, scientists were able to alter DNA to correct genetic defects in animals and modify DNA sequences in embryonic stem cells, an advance that opened the path to germ-line (sperm and egg) genome modification in humans. Doudna and Charpentier shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery and development of gene editing technologies.

Doudna spent much of her youth in Hilo, Hawaii. After earning a degree in chemistry in 1985 from Pomona College in California, she went to Harvard University. There she worked in the laboratory of English-born American biochemist and geneticist Jack W. Szostak (who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine) and in 1989 completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry. In 1994, following postdoctoral studies at the University of Colorado under the direction of American biochemist and molecular biologist Thomas R. Cech (who received a share of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Chemistry), she joined the faculty at Yale University. In 2002 she moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as professor of biochemistry and molecular biology.

Early in her career Doudna worked to deduce the three-dimensional structures of RNA molecules, which provided insight on RNA catalytic activity. She later investigated the control of genetic information by certain small RNAs and became interested in CRISPR. CRISPR is part of the bacterial immune system. It originates with RNA sequences from invading viruses that become incorporated into bacterial genomes. The viral sequences reside as DNA in the spacers between short repeating blocks of bacterial DNA sequences. The next time the virus invades the bacterial cell, the spacer DNA is converted to RNA. The Cas9 enzyme and a second RNA molecule attach to the newly coded RNA, which then seeks out matching strands of viral DNA. When encountered, Cas9 cuts the viral DNA, preventing the virus’s replication. Doudna and Charpentier found that the guide RNA sequence could be changed to direct Cas9 to a precise DNA sequence. Their discovery quickly transformed the landscape of genome engineering, creating new opportunities for the treatment of human disease.

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Genome engineering in humans was an inevitable result of rapid advances in genetic engineering technologies. However, little was known about its safety, and its use to edit human DNA renewed ethical concerns, particularly about whether genetic engineering technologies should be used to modify nondisease traits, such as intelligence. In early 2015 Doudna organized an effort that called for a moratorium on human genome editing, and in April of that year she and colleagues laid out a framework for immediate actions to safeguard the genomes of human embryos against modification. Despite the precautionary effort, however, in April 2015 Chinese scientists reported having altered human embryo genomes via CRISPR-Cas9.

In addition to receiving the Nobel Prize, Doudna received numerous honours and awards for her research, including the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015) and the Canada Gairdner International Award (2016), both shared with Charpentier. Doudna was an elected member of multiple academies and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator (from 1997).