Wed 07 October 2020:
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was jointly awarded on Wednesday to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for their 2012 work on the development of Crispr-Cas9, a method for genome editing. The announcement marks the first time a science Nobel has been awarded to two women.
Charpentier, who is French, and Doudna, an American, become the sixth and seventh women to win a Nobel Prize for chemistry, joining the likes of Marie Curie (1911) and, more recently, Frances Arnold (2018).
“This technology has had a revolutionary impact on the life sciences, is contributing to new cancer therapies and may make the dream of curing inherited diseases come true.”
“There is enormous power in this genetic tool, which affects us all,” said Claes Gustafsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.
“It has not only revolutionised basic science, but also resulted in innovative crops and will lead to ground-breaking new medical treatments.”
Gustafsson said, as a result, any genome can now be edited “to fix genetic damage”, adding that the tool “will provide humankind with great opportunities”.
But he cautioned that the “enormous power of this technology means we have to use it with great care”.
The prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were created and funded in the will of Swedish dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel and have been awarded since 1901, with the economics award a later addition.
Like so much else, the coronavirus pandemic has redrawn the Nobels, with many of the traditional events, such as the grand banquet, cancelled or moved online even as research into the disease – above all the hunt for a vaccine – has dominated the scientific spotlight.
Yesterday, an American astronomer, a German astrophysicist and a British mathematician, Sir Roger Penrose, shared the physics prize for their work on black hole formation and the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
