Jennifer Doudna is a Nobel Prize-winning American biochemist who made fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics and did pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing. CRISPR, short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, is a genetic engineering technique in molecular biology that allows the genomes of living organisms to be manipulated. Doudna was the first to propose that enzymes from the bacteria that control microbial immunity (CRISPR-Cas9) could be used for the programmable editing of genomes.
Doudna grew up in Hawaii, where inspiration from the natural wonders of her environment sparked an interest in science. Her father gifted her a copy of The Double Helix, James Watson's account of his and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA, which was the incentive she needed to focus on genetics. Doudna earned her Bachelor of Arts at Pomona College in California, where she undertook her first scientific research in the lab of Professor Sharon Panasenko. She then went to Harvard Medical School for her Doctor of Medicine and earned a Doctor of Philosophy in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology in 1989.
During this time, Doudna became fascinated with the study of RNA, and her scientific career became devoted to revealing its secrets. Jack W. Szostak, a geneticist who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine, supervised her dissertation. Later, she held research fellowships in molecular biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and in genetics at Harvard Medical School. After that, she was the Lucille P. Markey Postdoctoral Scholar in Biomedical Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, which led to a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University.
In 1997, Doudna was named a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, a title that has provided material support for her research ever since. She eventually partnered with Emmanuelle Charpentier, a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry. Together, they founded CRISPR and published a finding in 2012 that CRISPR-Cas9 could be programmed with RNA to edit genomic DNA. This is now considered one of the most momentous breakthroughs in the history of biology. Doudna and her collaborator won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.