Isaacson hones in on Doudna and Charpentier, but he also highlights others in the scientific community whose work led the way and contributed to this new discovery. But 2020 was the year it went to two women, Jennifer Doudna and French colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier, for the development of CRISPR, a gene editing technology. Until 2020, only five women, beginning with Marie Curie in 1911, had won a Nobel for chemistry. Should we use our new evolution-hacking powers to make us less susceptible to viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! And what about preventing depression? Hmmm…Should we allow parents, if they can afford it, to enhance the height or muscles or IQ of their kids?Īfter helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code. Now we are entering a life-science revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and internet. The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions. She and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.ĭriven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, told her was the most important biological advance since his co-discovery of the structure of DNA. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed.
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