Jennifer doudna

Jennifer Doudna, a woman whose work has triggered the explosion in innovation in the field of synthetic biology and has given researchers around the world

The world-famous biochemist is ready to tackle everything from immune disorders and mental illness to climate change—all by altering microbes in the digestive tract.

The biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, helped make a monumental discovery: a relatively simple way to alter any organism’s DNA. But she is stuck in a patent fight over it.

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier shared the 2020 Nobel chemistry prize for their discovery of CRISPR, the game-changing gene-editing technique. Professor Charpentier (right) was studying Streptococcus pyogenes when she discovered a previously unknown molecule, tracrRNA. Her work showed that tracrRNA is part of bacteria’s ancient immune system, CRISPR/Cas. It could disarm viruses by cleaving their DNA.

Jennifer Doudna

Pioneering biochemist Jennifer Doudna sat down with WIRED’s Emily Mullin to talk about the future of Crispr.

You've probably heard of CRISPR, the revolutionary technology that allows us to edit the DNA in living organisms. Biochemist and 2023 Audacious Project grantee Jennifer Doudna earned the Nobel Prize for her groundbreaking work in this field -- and now she's here to tell us about its next world-changing advancement. She explains how her team at the Innovative Genomics Institute is pioneering a brand new field of science -- precision microbiome editing -- that uses CRISPR in an effort to solve…

Jennifer Doudna had recently arrived at Berkeley to accept a professorship in biochemistry when a colleague drew her attention to unusual bacteria found in an abandoned mine. The property of a single protein, Cas9, found in this microbe, led her to a revolutionary new technique of editing the genome. Known as CRISPR (for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”), the technique she demonstrated is many times faster and far more precise than all previously existing methods…