Hello everyone! I'm Tina and this is Women Weekly, where I post about one wonderful woman in the STEM field every Friday. This week you're gonna read about one of the few female Nobel Prize winners – Jennifer Doudna.
Jennifer Doudna was born in 1964 in Washington D.C. but soon moved to Hawaii because her father got a job offer there. Hawaii's beautiful fauna and flora sparked Jennifer's interest in science and her parents, both of whom were teachers, happily supported her curiosity. After reading The Double Helix, which her father had gifted her in 6th grade, she dreamed of becoming a scientist. She graduated from Hilo High School and went on to study biochemistry at Pomona College, California. For her doctoral education, Jennifer chose Harvard Medical School. Her dissertation was focused on RNA and supervised by Jack W. Szostak.
Early in her career, she worked on understanding and engineering ribozymes, and a major step in doing so was seeing their structure. She started the project of crystalizing RNA to see its 3D structure in the lab of Thomas Cech and finished it at Yale University, where she got the position of assistant professor and continued studying ribozymes. In Cech's lab, she met her second husband Jamie Cate. They moved around for a while, accepting positions at various universities, but both later settled at Berkeley University and went on to have a son who was also interested in sciences.
Jennifer's biggest accomplishment would be in the field of genome editing of DNA, for which she won a Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Together with Emmanuelle Charpentier, she studied a bacteria's immune system called CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) that detects and destroys viral DNA in time. The tool that the system uses to do this is a protein called Cas9. Doudna and Charpentier discovered that different RNAs can be used to program the protein to cut and edit different DNAs. This discovery majorly simplified the process of genome editing, their way is very precise and quite easy in comparison with previously used techniques. It also sheds light on numerous areas where genome editing could be used, whether for good (curing disease) or for business (obtaining desirable traits, designing perfect humans).
This raised an ethical dilemma, which was luckily taken seriously and Doudna with her colleagues called for a global pause in any clinical use of this technology in human embryos, until we know much more about this process. Being able to remove, add, and alter specific traits in living organisms brings us one step closer to the future, so it is very important we don't get carried away and approach such a great discovery with even greater caution.
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