By Walter Isaacson
The coronavirus pandemic forced Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier to accept the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry virtually, instead of actually attending the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciencesâ annual December ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall, where the king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, would have given each of them an 18-karat gold medal along with a congratulatory handshake. This yearâs gala, like so many events everywhere, was canceled for the first time in decades.
The landmark research that brought Doudna and Charpentier to the pinnacle of global acclaim has the potential to control future pandemics â either by outwitting the next viral plague through better screening and treatment or by engineering human beings with better disease resistance programmed into their cells. The technique of gene editing that they patented, which goes by the unwieldy acronym of CRISPR-Cas9, makes it possible to selectively snip and alter bits of DNA as t
#8M: Jennifer A. Doudna, Premio Nobel de Química: "A estas alturas no nos debería sorprender que dos mujeres lideren un proyecto científico de Nobel, pero aún ocurre". woman.es - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from woman.es Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.