Nobel Prize In Chemistry Won By Women Scientists For Rewriting Genetic Code Of Life

This year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry has been awarded to French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer A. Doudna. The duo has won the prestigious award for the development of a method of genome editing known as CRISPR.

The new Nobel Prize winners were announced by Goran Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Wednesday in Stockholm. As part of the prize, the winners? will get a gold medal and prize money of 10 million krona (USD 1.1 million).

Emmanuelle Charpentier (L) and Jennifer A. Doudna (R) (Image: Nobel Prize)

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“This year’s prize is about rewriting the code of life,” Hansson said as he announced the names of the laureates. With the announcement, Dr. Charpentier and Dr. Doudna have become only the fifth and sixth women to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The groundbreaking work

Both the scientists share the prize equally for pioneering a genome editing method called CRISPR-Cas9. The method allows scientists to alter the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision.

Short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9, the CRISPR-Cas9 system has been regarded as nothing short of a revolution in the scientific community. It has been found to be faster, cheaper and more efficient than other known genome editing methods.

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French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier (L) and professor Jennifer Doudna of the U.S. (Image: Reuters)

Because of these advantages, CRISPR is already making headway for diagnosing diseases as well as developing new treatments, and even improving our agriculture techniques. It was recently also being used to find a cure for HIV.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry comes a day after the winners for the Nobel Prize in Physics were announced to be Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for their research in black holes. On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine to Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice as well as Michael Houghton for discovering the hepatitis C virus.

The next Nobel prizes will be awarded for outstanding work in the fields of literature, peace and economics.

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