UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna wins Nobel Prize for genome research

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Berkeley, biochemist Jennifer Doudna has won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry, sharing it with colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier for the co-development of CRISPR-Cas9, a genome editing breakthrough that has revolutionized biomedicine.

CRISPR-Cas9 allows scientists to rewrite DNA — the code of life — in any organism, including human cells, with unprecedented efficiency and precision. The groundbreaking power and versatility of CRISPR-Cas9 has opened up new and wide-ranging possibilities across biology, agriculture and medicine, including the treatment of thousands of intractable diseases.