The Nobel Prize in chemistry went to two researchers Wednesday for a gene-editing tool that has revolutionized science by providing a way to alter DNA, the code of life—the technology already being used to try to cure a host of diseases and raise better crops and livestock.
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A Doudna will share the 10m Swedish kronor (£870,000) prize announced on Wednesday by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.
The researchers won the prize for “the development of a method for genome editing”, according to the formal citation from the Nobel committee.
Charpentier and Doudna were working independently when they stumbled upon different pieces of information that later came together to be developed into this technology.
Charpentier, a biologist then working at a laboratory in Sweden, needed the expertise of a biochemist to process the new information she had got on the genetic sequences in a particular bacteria she had been working on called Streptococcus pyogenes.
Previous winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
2019 – John B Goodenough, M Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino share the prize for their work on lithium-ion batteries.
2018 – Discoveries about enzymes earned Frances Arnold, George P Smith and Gregory Winter the prize.
2017 – Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson were awarded the prize for improving images of biological molecules.
2016 – Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Fraser Stoddart and Bernard Feringa shared the prize for the making machines on a molecular scale.
2015 – Discoveries in DNA repair earned Tomas Lindahl and Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar the award.
2014 – Eric Betzig, Stefan Hell and William Moerner were awarded the prize for improving the resolution of optical microscopes.
2013 – Michael Levitt, Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel shared the prize, for devising computer simulations of chemical processes.
2012 – Work that revealed how protein receptors pass signals between living cells and the environment won the prize for Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka.
Prof. Charpentier, 51, and Prof. Doudna, 56, are just the sixth and seventh women to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and this is the first time a Nobel science prize goes to a women-only team.
Prof. Charpentier told reporters she considered herself “a scientist” first, but hoped the prize would provide “a really strong message for young girls”.