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Changing the code of life
Congratulations! On 7 October, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that it had awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry to two women scientists: Emmanuelle Charpentier (L), a French microbiologist, geneticist and biochemist, who is now the director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin, Germany, and Jennifer Doudna (R), an American biochemist who is a professor of chemistry, biochemistry and molecular biology at UC Berkeley.
The scientists developed a simple, cheap, yet powerful, and precise technique for editing DNA, which is called CRISPR-Cas9 (an acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) and popularly referred to as a pair of ‘genetic-scissors’. The technology endows science and scientists with extraordinary powers to manipulate genes to cure genetic diseases, improve crops to withstand drought, mould and pests, and affect climate change, and is considered to be the most important discovery in the history of biology. The Nobel citation refers to Charpentier’s and Doudna’s scientific contribution as a, “tool for rewriting the code of life”, which has “a revolutionary impact on the life sciences, by contributing to new cancer therapies and may make the dream of curing inherited diseases come true”. For more than four years HealthPad has been following and publishing Commentaries on the scientists’ work. Our Commentaries have a large and growing global following of leading physicians, scientists, policy makers, journalists and students. The Commentaries listed below about CRISPR techniques, which we re-publish to celebrate Charpentier’s and Doudna’s Nobel Prize, have had more than 120,000 views.
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