In honor of Women’s History Month, join us throughout March as we celebrate women innovators and trailblazers and share their stories and insights. Today we honor Jennifer Doudna, FNAI and Nobel laureate of NAI Member Institution the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Doudna co-invented CRISPR-Cas9, a technology that allows for genome editing by making precise edits to DNA. This technology has the potential to be applied to a wide variety of issues, including in agriculture to create climate change resistant crop and in medicine to find treatments and possibly cures for genetic diseases. She and her colleague, Emmanuelle Charpentier, jointly won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for their work on CRISPR.
As she and other scientists around the world study the potential uses for this technology, she advocates for the ethical and responsible use of CRISPR.
What drives her work?
“That’s why we do science, because every now and then there’s this incredible joy of figuring something out, and realizing that, I’m maybe the first person on the planet to know this little factoid, and it’s just incredibly fun.”
Listen to Dr. Doudna explain CRISPR and it’s possible uses here: http://ow.ly/QEJh50Im7s9