49 Fun Facts About Jennifer Doudna

The 2020 Nobel announcement summed up Doudna and Charpentier's CRISPR tool as "genetic" what?

Scissors: the tool cuts DNA at a spot the researcher chooses, and the rewriting happens when the cell repairs the break.

The first medicine built on Doudna's CRISPR tool won approval in 2023 to treat which inherited disease?

Sickle cell disease: the therapy, Casgevy, edits a patient's own blood stem cells so that they make more fetal haemoglobin, which keeps red blood cells from sickling.

Doudna's 2020 Nobel Prize was awarded in which category?

Chemistry. Her phone was on silent, so she slept through the call from Sweden and learned she had won from a reporter who rang at 2:53 a.m. asking for a comment.

Which tycoon founded the medical institute that has backed Doudna since 1997?

Howard Hughes created the institute in 1953 and made his aircraft company its sole asset; when trustees sold Hughes Aircraft to General Motors in 1985 for about $5 billion, the proceeds became its research endowment.

Doudna, a speechwriter's daughter, was born in 1964 in which city?

Washington, D.C., where her father wrote speeches for the military until he got the itch to teach: he took a doctorate in literature at Michigan and became a professor.

When Doudna was seven, her family moved to which state so her father could teach American literature?

Hawaii. The Big Island's oddities, such as blind spiders living in lava tubes, set her asking how living things came to be that way.

Which book, given to her by her father in sixth grade, was a major inspiration for Doudna?

The Double Helix, James Watson's account of how DNA's structure was found, read to her like a mystery: she has said it first gave her the sense of a scientist as a sleuth on a trail.

In a nightmare Doudna has described, which historical figure wanted her to explain how CRISPR works?

Adolf Hitler. She has said the dream brought home what the tool could do in the wrong hands, and it pushed her to call scientists together to debate limits on its use.

Doudna earned her undergraduate degree in 1985 at which California liberal arts college?

Pomona. A high-school guidance counsellor had told her that women don't go into science; she enrolled at 17 to do it anyway.

As an undergraduate, Doudna briefly considered switching from her science major to what?

French. She stayed with science instead, and by her final year she was doing research in the lab of her adviser, the biochemist Sharon Panasenko.

Doudna earned her Ph.D. in 1989 from which institution?

Harvard Medical School is where her thesis asked whether RNA could be made to copy itself, a test of the idea that life began with RNA rather than DNA.

Doudna's Ph.D. supervisor, Jack Szostak, went on to share the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries about what?

Telomeres, the protective caps on the tips of chromosomes, made Szostak's name in DNA; by the time Doudna joined his lab he was switching to RNA and the origin of life.

As a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, Doudna worked with which Nobel laureate?

Thomas Cech had shared a 1989 Nobel Prize for showing that RNA can act as an enzyme; Doudna joined his Boulder lab to crystallise such RNA and see its three-dimensional shape.

Before Doudna's work, CRISPR was first shown to be an immune system by scientists at a firm making cultures for which food?

Yogurt: Danisco's researchers wanted starter cultures that would survive attack in the vat, and in 2007 they showed that the bacteria keep a genetic record of past invaders and use it to fight them off.

In 2018 a scientist in which country announced the first gene-edited babies, the misuse of CRISPR that Doudna had warned against?

China. He Jiankui revealed the twin girls on the eve of a Hong Kong summit on gene editing that Doudna attended, and a Chinese court later sentenced him to three years in prison.

Doudna's team found that the RNA enzyme they mapped in the 1990s folds around a core of ions of which metal?

Magnesium: five of its ions sit at the centre and the rest of the RNA folds around them, much as a protein folds around its water-shunning core.

Doudna joined the faculty of which university as an assistant professor in 1994?

Yale is where, in 1996, her team published the structure of a large folded RNA, showing that it was no loose strand of spaghetti but packed into a defined shape, much as proteins are.

Doudna moved to Berkeley in 2002 alongside which person, who also took up a professorship there?

Her husband, Jamie Cate, had been the graduate student who worked beside her on the RNA structure in Colorado; their son was born the same year they moved west.

Which biotech company did Doudna leave Berkeley for in 2009, returning after two months?

Genentech lasted two months: she found she could not do without academic freedom, and the empty calendar she came back to gave her time to dig into CRISPR.

A Berkeley colleague who had never met Doudna found her through what, then introduced her to CRISPR?

A Google search: microbiologist Jillian Banfield typed in 'RNAi and UC Berkeley', Doudna's name came up, and the two met at a Berkeley café to talk over the strange sequences in her microbes' DNA.

A visiting scientist's lecture on which disease left the teenage Doudna determined to do research herself?

Cancer. The speaker was a woman explaining how normal cells turn cancerous, and Doudna, who knew of no living women scientists, later recalled thinking, 'I wanted to be her.'

The Cas9 protein in Doudna's Nobel-winning work came from the bacterium that causes which illness?

Strep throat: Charpentier had spent years on Streptococcus pyogenes, the so-called flesh eater behind it, and what she found in that microbe is what she brought to Doudna.

In nature, CRISPR is an immune system that protects bacteria against what?

Viruses that prey on bacteria leave a trace: a surviving cell files a snippet of the attacker's DNA in its own genome and uses it to recognise and cut up the next one.

The letters CRISPR stand for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic what?

Repeats: the same short stretch of DNA recurs again and again, yet the real interest lay in the gaps, where the unique 'spacers' between copies turned out to be mugshots of past attackers.

Long before Doudna's work, the DNA pattern later named CRISPR was first spotted in 1987 in which common gut bacterium?

E. coli: Yoshizumi Ishino's team at Osaka University came across the odd pattern by accident while sequencing the DNA around another gene, and had no idea what it was for.

Doudna and Charpentier first met in 2011 at a conference in which place?

San Juan, Puerto Rico: introduced at a café during the conference, the two took a walk through the old town, and Charpentier proposed that they join forces.

What is the single synthetic molecule Doudna and Charpentier engineered to tell Cas9 where to cut?

Guide RNA: they fused two natural RNA strands into one, so that aiming the cut at a new target meant no more than rewriting about twenty letters of it.

Which organisation won the 2017 US patent decision over CRISPR-Cas9 in human cells?

The Broad Institute, in Massachusetts, argued that getting the tool to work inside human cells was a separate invention from the test-tube original; the patent board agreed, and an appeals court upheld it in 2018.

Who became Doudna's rival in the CRISPR patent fight after showing the tool could edit human cells?

Feng Zhang's paper appeared in January 2013, about four weeks before Doudna's own demonstration in human cells, and the first sweeping patents on the tool went to him.

Doudna co-founded which company in 2011 to commercialise CRISPR technology?

Caribou Biosciences was her first company, started with her former graduate student Rachel Haurwitz before the landmark 2012 paper had even appeared.

Charpentier co-founded which gene-editing company in 2013, a rival to the firms Doudna helped start?

CRISPR Therapeutics was Charpentier's own venture, and it went on to co-develop the first CRISPR medicine to win approval.

CasX, the enzyme behind Doudna's company Scribe Therapeutics, is prized mainly for being what, compared with Cas9?

Smaller: getting a gene editor into the right cells of a patient is the hard part, and a compact enzyme slips inside far more easily than the bulky original.

Doudna's 2017 book about gene editing, co-written with Samuel Sternberg, is titled what?

A Crack in Creation is half lab memoir, half warning: she hoped its call for restraint would deter reckless use of the tool, and a year later the experiment she feared happened anyway.

In 2015 Doudna called for a pause on clinical gene editing of what?

The germline means eggs, sperm and embryos: a change made there is inherited by every generation that follows, which is why she and fellow biologists asked the world to wait.

Mammoth Biosciences, which Doudna co-founded in 2017, was set up to pursue which use of CRISPR?

Diagnostic tests: the firm built CRISPR-based detectors for infections and won US emergency clearance for one in 2022, then in 2023 dropped diagnostics to work on treatments instead.

In March 2020 Doudna's genomics institute turned its research labs into what, in about three weeks?

A COVID testing centre: instead of shutting down, her scientists set up an automated lab that handled swabs for the campus, local first responders and nearby communities with little access to testing.

Doudna's Innovative Genomics Institute was launched in 2014 as a partnership between Berkeley and which other university?

UCSF: she founded it with the San Francisco biologist Jonathan Weissman, with the stated aim of CRISPR advances that are accessible and affordable to all.

Doudna's 2000 Alan T. Waterman Award is which US body's top honour for young researchers?

The National Science Foundation cited the technique she devised for coaxing large RNA molecules into crystals, the step that made it possible to see their shape atom by atom.

In 2015 Doudna and Charpentier shared which award in life sciences, funded by tech billionaires?

The Breakthrough Prize, handed over at a star-studded Silicon Valley gala, paid each of them $3 million, several times what the Nobel later brought.

In 2021 which religious leader appointed Doudna to his own academy of sciences?

Pope Francis named her to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which picks members for their science whatever their faith; the Vatican had been weighing the ethics of gene editing for years.

The Doudna supercomputer, announced in 2025, is a Dell system built around chips from which company?

Nvidia, whose chief Jensen Huang called it 'a time machine for science'. Like its predecessor, named for the physicist Saul Perlmutter, the machine honours a Nobel laureate who works at the lab.

Before CRISPR, Doudna's lab showed that Dicer, an enzyme that chops RNA into equal lengths, works as a molecular what?

Ruler: the enzyme grips one end of the RNA with a clamp and cuts with a blade set a fixed distance away, so every piece comes out about 25 letters long.

Besides CRISPR, Doudna found that which virus uses an unusual strategy to make its proteins?

Hepatitis C carries a folded stretch of RNA that grabs the cell's protein-making machinery directly and hijacks it for the virus, skipping most of the usual start-up steps.

In 2016 Doudna was elected a foreign member of which British scientific academy?

The Royal Society asks each new member to sign its Charter Book, a vellum volume that has gathered the signatures of scientists and British monarchs since the 1660s.

Doudna was named 2026 recipient of which medal, the top honour of a society founded in 1876?

The Priestley Medal is named for Joseph Priestley, the English minister and co-discoverer of oxygen, who sailed for America in 1794 after a mob burned down his house and laboratory.

Who wrote the 2021 biography The Code Breaker about Doudna and gene editing?

Walter Isaacson cast her story as the start of a third great revolution of modern times: after the atom and the digital bit comes the gene, which her tool lets us rewrite.

The 2015 meeting Doudna convened to weigh the ethics of CRISPR was held in which California wine region?

Napa Valley hosted about twenty researchers; she modelled the meeting on the 1975 Asilomar conference, where biologists set their own limits on a risky new technology, and two of Asilomar's organisers took part.

Virginijus Šikšnys, who shared the 2018 Kavli Prize with Doudna and Charpentier, did his rival CRISPR work in which country?

Lithuania: Šikšnys's team in Vilnius sent off a similar finding first, but one journal rejected it without review and it appeared after Doudna and Charpentier's fast-tracked paper.

In 2022 Doudna became chief science advisor to Sixth Street, which is what kind of firm?

An investment firm: Sixth Street asked her to assemble a board of scientific advisers and to guide its bets on companies built around CRISPR.