Jennifer Doudna nearly switched to French before co-inventing CRISPR gene editing
As a first-year chemistry student, Jennifer Doudna doubted she had what it took and considered majoring in French. Her French teacher told her to stick with science. Decades later she shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for turning a bacterial immune system into a tool for editing DNA.
Doudna was born in Washington, D.C., in 1964 and moved to Hilo, Hawaii, at seven, when her father took a literature post at the local university. She grew up fascinated by the island's plants and animals, and in sixth grade her father handed her James Watson's The Double Helix, which she has called a major inspiration. A high school chemistry teacher, Jeanette Wong, and a summer in a mycologist's lab pushed her further toward science.
Her early career was about RNA, not genes. After a Harvard doctorate she joined Thomas Cech's lab in Colorado to do something nobody had managed: work out the three-dimensional structure of a ribozyme, an RNA molecule that acts like an enzyme. She started in 1991 and finished at Yale in 1996, showing how a cluster of magnesium ions forms a core the rest of the molecule folds around. She moved to Berkeley in 2002, joining her husband, Jamie Cate.
CRISPR found her almost by accident. In 2006 the microbiologist Jillian Banfield searched online for RNA interference researchers at Berkeley, and Doudna's name came up first. The CRISPR system itself had been spotted in 1987 by Yoshizumi Ishino, but in 2012 Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier showed that its Cas9 protein, guided by RNA, could be programmed to cut any chosen stretch of DNA. The discovery set off a scramble, including a long patent fight with the Broad Institute, whose scientists showed editing in human cells months later.
She has since become a leading voice on the ethics of the tool. She backs edits to body cells that are not inherited, opposes altering eggs, sperm or embryos, and joined other biologists in calling for a moratorium on clinical gene editing. In 2017 she co-wrote A Crack in Creation, a first-person account of the breakthrough for general readers.
Source: Jennifer Doudna
