Who Are the Two Chilean Nobel Prizel Recipients? Go to the Arts
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna take won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their gene editing technique. Hither, they are honored at the Quantum Prize honour ceremony at the NASA Ames Enquiry Heart in California in 2014. Peter Barreras/Invision/AP hide caption
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Peter Barreras/Invision/AP
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna accept won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their gene editing technique. Hither, they are honored at the Breakthrough Prize laurels anniversary at the NASA Ames Research Middle in California in 2014.
Peter Barreras/Invision/AP
The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded this year to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their work on "genetic scissors" that can cutting DNA at a precise location, assuasive scientists to make specific changes to specific genes.
"This technology has had a revolutionary affect on the life sciences, is contributing to new cancer therapies and may make the dream of curing inherited diseases come true," the Nobel Committee said in announcing the prize.
Already, doctors take used the engineering science to experimentally care for sickle cell disease, with promising results.
While some inquiry advances take decades for people to fully appreciate how transformative they are, that wasn't the case for this new tool, known every bit CRISPR-Cas9.
"Once in a long fourth dimension, an advance comes along that utterly transforms an unabridged field and does so very rapidly," says Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, which has long supported Doudna's research. "You cannot walk into a molecular biology laboratory today, working on virtually any organism, where CRISPR-Cas9 is not playing a role in the ability to understand how life works and how disease happens. It's just that powerful."
Since scientific papers were published in 2011 and 2012 describing the work, Charpentier says people had repeatedly suggested to her that it was worthy of a Nobel Prize.
"It was indeed mentioned to me a number of times, maybe more than what I would have liked, that one day this then-called discovery may be awarded the Nobel Prize," Charpentier said in a press briefing.
Still, even after winning other big awards, she says, that possibility didn't completely hit her until Goran K. Hansson, the secretarial assistant-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, chosen to tell her the news.
"I was very emotional, I accept to say," says Charpentier, who added that she had been told that winning a Nobel is ever a big surprise and feels unreal. "Obviously, it's real, and so I have to get used to it now."
There'south been an ongoing feud, including a fight over lucrative patents, over who deserves the most credit for the development of CRISPR-Cas9.
"It's a big field and in that location's a lot of good scientific discipline being done in this field. But nosotros have decided this year to award the prize to Charpentier and Doudna, and I tin can simply say that," said Claes Gustafsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, when asked if the committee had considered including anyone else in the prize.
"I guess whenever there's a Nobel Prize pick, in that location's ever some second-guessing about who got left out," notes Collins, who says that George Church and Feng Zhang "and a long listing of others" made information technology clear that this kind of approach could work in virtually any kind of jail cell.
Such a powerful new tool invariably raises questions most how it should be used ethically, particularly considering that one researcher in China controversially used this technique to genetically alter babies.
When that scientist described his piece of work in modifying human embryos, Doudna said that she was "horrified and stunned." She's called for regulation of the applied science, writing that "ensuring responsible use of genome editing volition enable CRISPR technology to improve the well-being of millions of people and fulfill its revolutionary potential."
Doudna is a Howard Hughes Investigator at the University of California, Berkeley. Charpentier is with the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin.
For ii women to share the Nobel Prize in chemistry is unusual. Between 1901 and 2020, it has been awarded to 185 individuals, and only seven of them have been women. In recent years, the Nobel committees have been trying to increase the diversity of researchers nominated for the science Nobel Prizes, which have been criticized for historically overlooking the achievements of both women and people of colour.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/07/921043046/2-female-scientists-awarded-nobel-prize-in-chemistry-for-genome-editing-research
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