Jennifer Doudna

Why you should listen

Growing up roaming the rainforests of Hawaii, Jennifer Doudna developed an early curiosity about how the living world works. This interest would lead to a PhD in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard and an esteemed research career focusing primarily on RNA. In 2002, she joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where she remains a professor and researcher. A fellow Berkeley professor, Jillian Banfield, came to her with a puzzle: an unusual repeating pattern found in microbial DNA called "CRISPR."

Together with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, Doudna is at the center of one of today’s most-discussed scientific discoveries: a technology called CRISPR-Cas9 that enables genome editing in any living cell. This monumental contribution to science earned the two the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and forever changed the course of human and agricultural genomics research. In 2017, Doudna coauthored A Crack in Creation, a reflection on the responsibility of such a discovery, and she continues to lead public discussion on the ethical implications of genome editing.