Born: 19 February 1964, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: International
Also known as: Jennifer Anne Doudna-Cate
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Dr. Jennifer Doudna began collaborating on technology that would change the world—and win them a Nobel Prize—in their 40s. Born in 1964 and 1968 respectively, Doudna and Charpentier met in 2011. By the following year, they had developed a molecular tool known as clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9, which would serve as the foundation for gene editing and enable researchers to make specific changes to DNA sequences much more efficiently and simply than was possible previously. In addition to the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the duo shared the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2015) and the Canada Gairdner International Award (2016) for their work, and Charpentier also received the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience (2018).
Doudna is an American biochemist who studied under two other Nobel laureate biochemists at Harvard and the University of Colorado, respectively before joining the faculty of first Yale and later the University of California, Berkeley. She was interested in analyzing the structure of RNA molecules to gain insight on RNA’s catalytic activity, and later explored certain RNAs’ control of genetic information. Charpentier, meanwhile, had completed her studies in France before coming to the U.S. in the 1990s for research work in New York, including the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine. She returned to Europe in 2002 to take a research position at the University of Vienna, where she discovered a regulatory RNA molecule that controls virulence factors in Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria.
It was this interest in RNA that led both scientists to CRISPR, part of the bacterial immune system that originates with RNA sequences from invading viruses that are incorporated into bacterial genomes. The viral sequences exist as DNA in the spacers between short, repeating blocks of the bacteria’s own DNA sequences. When the Cas9 enzyme encounters the viral DNA, Cas9 cuts it, preventing the virus from replicating. In 2009, Charpentier moved to the Umeå Centre for Microbial Research in Sweden, where she and Elitza Deltcheva worked together on how CRISPR could cut and modify DNA at specific locations in the genome. Doudna and Charpentier would discover the mechanism by which Cas9 slices DNA, and how to use a guiding RNA sequence to direct the Cas9 to a precise DNA sequence.
In 2013, Charpentier co-founded CRISPR Therapeutics, which uses CRISPR methodology for human gene therapy. Doudna has publicly voiced ethical concerns about the use of CRISPR for human genome editing of embryos, calling for regulation and caution, not least because of the likelihood of unforeseen outcomes.