Jennifer doudna

The biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, helped make a monumental discovery: a relatively simple way to alter any organism’s DNA. But she is stuck in a patent fight over it.

Jennifer Doudna, a woman whose work has triggered the explosion in innovation in the field of synthetic biology and has given researchers around the world

Jennifer Doudna

Pioneering biochemist Jennifer Doudna sat down with WIRED’s Emily Mullin to talk about the future of Crispr.

"Jennifer Anne Doudna is a Professor of Chemistry and of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) since 1997."

Jennifer Doudna had recently arrived at Berkeley to accept a professorship in biochemistry when a colleague drew her attention to unusual bacteria found in an abandoned mine. The property of a single protein, Cas9, found in this microbe, led her to a revolutionary new technique of editing the genome. Known as CRISPR (for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”), the technique she demonstrated is many times faster and far more precise than all previously existing methods…

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier shared the 2020 Nobel chemistry prize for their discovery of CRISPR, the game-changing gene-editing technique. Professor Charpentier (right) was studying Streptococcus pyogenes when she discovered a previously unknown molecule, tracrRNA. Her work showed that tracrRNA is part of bacteria’s ancient immune system, CRISPR/Cas. It could disarm viruses by cleaving their DNA.

In this interview from National Geographic’s 2019 book “Women,” Jennifer Doudna discusses her award-winning work and says we must be ‘very open about the challenges that women face.’