Chemical scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna have been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their research into genome editing and the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 "genetic scissors."
Image: Niklas Elmehed for Nobel Media
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Chemical scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday, becoming only the sixth and seventh women ever to win the award in over a century.
The pair's research concerned "the development of a method for genome editing." Charpentier of France currently works in Germany and Doudna, an American, discovered the CRISPR-Cas9 "genetic scissors" in 2012, a breakthrough that "has taken the life sciences into a new epoch," the Nobel Committee said.
"This year's prize is about rewriting the code of life," the committee said. The tool the scientists developed can be used to change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision.
Charpentier is head of the Max Planck Insitute for the Science of Pathogens in Germany. Doudna is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Only seven women have won the prize, including Marie Curie
Rewriting the code of life
CRISPR is a molecular tool that allows scientists to make extremely precise changes to the genetic code of organisms that are still alive. It stands for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats," patterns in DNA discovered already in 1987, but which remained mysterious for years until evidence emerged in the mid-2000s that they belonged to the antivirus defense system of bacteria. What was happening was the bacteria were taking sections of the DNA of viruses and building them into their own genome.
The enzyme used by the bacteria has the codename Cas, and this is where the key breakthrough came. In 2012, teams in the US and Europe led by Doudna and Charpentier showed how the Cas system could be turned into a universal 'cut and paste' tool for editing gene sequences.
Lennart Randau, of Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, called CRISPR-Cas9 one of the "most beautiful examples we have of how basic research can revolutionize the entire science world."
Randau heads the prokaryotic RNA department at Philipps University and told DW that we are now "at a point where we can cleave human DNA very specifically and faster than ever before. We can take a gene that causes disease and correct it. This is the great impact of the CRISPR-Cas9 discovery for humanity."
There are companies all over the world testing this technology in clinical trials right now, Randau added, saying that it was "very possible that the method could be used in approved medical procedures within the next two years."
An application of CRISPR is particularly useful in altering the DNA of various plants and animals so they can withstand certain blights or viruses.
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Lingering concerns
CRISPR has also been the subject of widespread controversy.
Indirectly addressing the ethical questions brought about by the discovery of genetic scissors, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, Claes Gustaffson, warned that the technology must be "used with great care."
A scientist in China was imprisoned in 2019 for creating the world’s first "gene-edited babies." He Jiankui had announced to the world in the fall of 2018 that he had used CRISPR-Cas9 technology to produce human embryos that were immune to HIV. The experiment involved a woman who had already successfully given birth to genetically manipulated twins.
Another concern regarding the technology is what it does to the genetic material being altered. A systematic investigation published in 2018 in the journal Nature Biotechnology documented significant mutations to both mouse and human cells treated with the CRISPR-Cas9 technique.
In some cases, the mutations were so extensive that the researchers concluded that the genetic damage ensuing could lead to potentially serious health risks.
The flurry of attention (and controversy) that ensued in the wake of the CRISPR-Cas9 breakthrough, spanning academic areas from genetics to molecular biology and bioethics, was also overshadowed by a patent conflict.
Another US team beat them to a patent for applying the method on human cells, sparking a legal row over priority - and in February 2017, the US patent office ruled against Doudna and Charpentier. Despite this, they remain widely credited as the real pioneers of CRISPR by fellow scientists.
Asked at Thursday’s ceremony whether the Nobel committee considered including any other scientists in the 2020 prize, chemistry chair Claes Gustafsson said curtly that “this was a question we did not consider.”
The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million Swedish krona (about €950,000; $1.1 million).
As it did this year, the award has frequently honored work that led to practical applications in use today, such as last year's win for the brains behind the lithium-ion battery.
Most winners of the chemistry prize hailed from the US, the UK and Germany
Week of awards
On Monday, the committee awarded its prize for physiology or medicine to US scientists Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice as well as British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the hepatitis C virus. On Tuesday, three astrophysicists shared the award in physics for their research into black holes.
The other prizes awarded by the committee are for literature, peace and economics, most of which will be announced later this week. The winner of the peace prize will be announced on Friday.
The awards, handed out almost every year since 1901, come with a gold medal.
Nobel Prize: Chemistry in everyday life
Receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is a great honor. The laureates are rewarded for years of hard work. Many of their discoveries still influence our lives today.
Image: Imago/Science Photo Library
1980: Decoding our genetic makeup
It took 13 years to decode the entire sequence of the human genome. The result: Three billion components and roughly 20,000 genes make humans what they are. This knowledge is in part thanks to the work of Walter Gilbert and Fred Sanger. They received the Nobel Prize for their methods of exact DNA-sequencing.
Image: Fotolia/majcot
1988: Powerplant in a leaf
The most important chemical reaction on Earth can be observed in the woods: Photosynthesis. Plants, algae and bacteria use sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. Certain protein compounds in the cells are responsible for this. Robert Huber, Hartmut Michel and Johann Deisenhofer researched this mechanism and earned a Nobel Prize for their work.
1991: Getting the picture through nuclear magnetic resonance
Heart, brain, bones – an MRI can show all that in detail and help discover tumors, for example. The basis for this diagnostic tool is the high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Richard Ernst was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in developing the process.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
1995: Saving the ozone layer
Thanks to the ozone layer, people can get tan more or less safely – if we put on sunscreen. Ozone filters out the majority of the sunlight's harmful UV-B-radiation. Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland received the Nobel Prize for finding out what destroys the ozone layer: nitrogen oxide and chlorofluorocarbons.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
1996: The soccer molecule
Never heard of "fullerenes?" It's easy to picture them – just think of a soccer ball. It consists of numerous pentagons and hexagons. 60 carbon atoms are assembled like this in the most famous fullerene. Robert Curl Jr.m Sir Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley received the Nobel Prize for describing the fullerene structure.
1997: Energy through ATP
Adenosintriphosphat (ATP) is to our cells what coal, wind, or solar power are to us. Without this universal "energy currency," we couldn't flex our muscles. An adult human uses half his weight in ATP every day! Sir John Walker received the Nobel Prize, because he was able to explain how ATP is produced in the cell.
Image: Fotolia/Kzenon
2003: Water for the cell
Water pipes pump fresh water into a house and waste water out. Our cells' water supply works in a similar way, as Peter Agre showed in 1988. 15 years later, he received the Nobel Prize for discovering the protein that regulates the water passage through the cell membrane. This pipe process is universal: It works for humans, animals, plants and bacteria.
2005: Green chemistry
Protecting the environment and saving resources and energy. Thanks to Robert Grubbs, Richard Schrock und Yves Chauvin, these goals of green chemistry are no longer uptopian. The Nobel laureates found an elegant way to produce complex chemical compounds, now used by the pharmaceutical industry, for example. They rebuilt existing natural compounds in an efficient, environmentally-friendly way.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
2008: Light in the darkness
This luminous umbrella is actually the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. Its fluorescent green protein is used in numerous areas of biology. One of the facilitators of this technique was Nobel laureate Martin Chalfie. He used the glowing protein to mark cell parts of a nematode, or roundworm. That opened up a host of possibilities, like understanding the how nerve cells function.
2009: Factories of life
DNA directs the makeup of a cell's different parts. These parts are produced by tiny factories, the ribosomes. Humans would tend to specialize their activities in such a situation, but each ribosome produces thousands of different cell parts. Ada Yonath, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz received the Nobel Prize for discovering how these factories work.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
2011: Frying with quasicrystals
Should you ever burn your scrambled eggs, think of Dan Shechtman's discovery: quasicrystals. He received the Nobel Prize for discovering them. Structured like an oriental mosaic, they may soon be found in frying pans as an anti-stick-layer.
2012: Receptors for good taste
Billions of them are located in our body: Receptors can be found on the outside of every cell. Through them, cells can examine their surroundings, move and communicate with other cells. The "G-protein-coupled receptors" are important to perceive taste or smell. Americans Brian Kobilka and Robert Lefkowitz earned the Nobel Prize for exploring this protein family.
2013: Chemistry and computers
US researchers Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel laid "the foundation for the powerful programs that are used to understand and predict chemical processes." The Nobel Prize committe says "computer models mirroring real life have become crucial for most advances made in chemistry today."
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
2014: Heroes of microscopy
German physicist Stefan Hell and Americans Eric Betzig and William Moerner developed a new microscopy method. It shifts the limits of light microscopy to the nanoscale. Even living tissue, such as cancer cells, can now be studied in detail.
2018: The revolution of evolution
Frances H. Arnold, George P. Smith and Gregory P. Winter intervened in evolution and created something in the laboratory that nature itself did not produce. Claes Gustafsson of the Nobel Prize committee said at the time of the announcement: "They applied Charles Darwin's principles in the test tube." Today, for example, drug manufacturers use their methods to produce insulin for diabetics.
