How Crispr went from niche to Nobel
Katrina Kramer tells the story of how Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna developed the gene editing tool that won them the 2020 Nobel prize in chemistry
One of the greatest collaborations in biochemical history started in a café in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was 2011, and Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna were attending a microbiology conference that had a single small session dedicated to an obscure research field: clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or Crispr for short. Just nine years later, the pair have shared the Nobel prize in chemistry.