(Category The science of ageing)
The biggest biotech discovery of the century is about to change medicine forever
On a November evening last year,Jennifer Doudna put on a stylish black evening gown and headed to Hangar One, a building at NASA’s Ames Research Center that was constructed in 1932 to house dirigibles.
Under the looming arches of the hangar, Doudna mingled with celebrities like Benedict Cumberbatch, Cameron Diaz and Jon Hamm before receiving the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in life sciences, an award sponsored by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech billionaires.
Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and her collaborator, EmmanuelleCharpentierof the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Germany, each received $3 million for their invention of a potentially revolutionary tool for editing DNA known as CRISPR.
Doudna was not a gray-haired emerita being celebrated for work she did back when dirigibles ruled the sky.
It was only in 2012 that Doudna, Charpentier and their colleagues offered the first demonstration of CRISPR’s potential.
They crafted molecules that could enter a microbe and precisely snip its DNA at a location of the researchers’ choosing.
In January 2013, the scientists went one step further: They cut out a particular piece of DNA in human cells and replaced it with another one.
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