Nobel Prize for chemistry jointly awarded to scientists for ‘genome scissors’
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STOCKHOLM (NewsNation Now) — French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer A. Doudna have won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a method of genome editing known as CRISPR.
FILE PHOTO: French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier (L) and professor Jennifer Doudna of the U.S. pose for the media during a visit to a painting exhibition by children about the genome, at the San Francisco park in Oviedo, SPAIN, October 21, 2015. REUTERS/Eloy Alonso/File Photo TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY 
FILE – In this Dec. 1, 2015, file photo, Jennifer Doudna, a University of California, Berkeley, co-inventor of the CRISPR gene-editing tool that He Jiankui used, speaks at the National Academy of Sciences international summit on the safety and ethics of human gene editing, in Washington. The 2020 Nobel Prize for chemistry has been awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna “for the development of a method for genome editing.” A panel at the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm made the announcement Wednesday Oct. 7, 2020. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File) 
FILE – In this Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2015 file photo, Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Germany, speaks on a panel at the National Academy of Sciences international summit on the safety and ethics of human gene editing in Washington. The 2020 Nobel Prize for chemistry has been awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna “for the development of a method for genome editing.” A panel at the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm made the announcement Wednesday Oct. 7, 2020. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
“Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna have discovered one of gene technology’s sharpest tools: the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement on awarding the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.1 million) prize.
“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.”
“The ability to cut the DNA where you want has revolutionized the life sciences” Pernilla Wittung Stafshede, member of the academy of sciences, told reporters.
Charpentier and Doudna become the sixth and seventh women to win a Nobel for chemistry, joining the likes of Marie Curie, who won in 1911, and more recently, Frances Arnold, in 2018.
In keeping with tradition, chemistry is the third prize announced every year and follows those for medicine and physics earlier this week.
The prizes for achievements in science, literature, economics 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 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.
On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine to Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus.
Tuesday’s prize for physics went to Roger Penrose of Britain, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and Andrea Ghez of the United States for their breakthroughs in understanding the mysteries of cosmic black holes.
