Jennifer Doudna Trivia
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49 free Jennifer Doudna trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Jennifer Doudna nearly switched her major to French. Instead she solved the first three-dimensional structure of a ribozyme, took a Google-search cold call from a Berkeley colleague about odd bacterial repeats, and in 2012 showed with Emmanuelle Charpentier that CRISPR-Cas9 could be programmed to cut any DNA. Eight years later the pair shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first science Nobel ever won by two women alone. This Jennifer Doudna trivia quiz runs 49 questions across her life and work: growing up in Hilo, the copy of The Double Helix her father gave her, Pomona and Harvard, Jack Szostak and Thomas Cech, the ribozyme structure at Yale, the move to Berkeley, the two-month Genentech detour, Jillian Banfield, Charpentier and the Puerto Rico meeting, Cas9 and guide RNA, the Broad Institute patent battle, the companies she co-founded, her COVID testing lab, A Crack in Creation and the long list of prizes. Easy questions come first; the last third is for people who know their tracrRNA from their crRNA. Every answer is verified against Wikipedia's articles on Doudna, Charpentier and CRISPR, with the supporting sentence quoted under each question. Fans of this quiz should also try our genetics and famous scientists quizzes.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 2020 Nobel announcement summed up Doudna and Charpentier's CRISPR tool as "genetic" what?
Scissors
Scissors: the tool cuts DNA at a spot the researcher chooses, and the rewriting happens when the cell repairs the break.
Q 02The first medicine built on Doudna's CRISPR tool won approval in 2023 to treat which inherited disease?
Sickle cell 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.
Q 03Doudna's 2020 Nobel Prize was awarded in which category?
Chemistry
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.
Q 04Which tycoon founded the medical institute that has backed Doudna since 1997?
Howard Hughes
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.
Q 05Doudna, a speechwriter's daughter, was born in 1964 in which city?
Washington, D.C.
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.
Q 06When Doudna was seven, her family moved to which state so her father could teach American literature?
Hawaii
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.
Q 07Which book, given to her by her father in sixth grade, was a major inspiration for Doudna?
The Double Helix
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.
Q 08In a nightmare Doudna has described, which historical figure wanted her to explain how CRISPR works?
Adolf Hitler
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.
Q 09Doudna earned her undergraduate degree in 1985 at which California liberal arts college?
Pomona
Pomona. A high-school guidance counsellor had told her that women don't go into science; she enrolled at 17 to do it anyway.
Q 10As an undergraduate, Doudna briefly considered switching from her science major to what?
French
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.
Q 11Doudna earned her Ph.D. in 1989 from which institution?
Harvard Medical School
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.
Q 12Doudna's Ph.D. supervisor, Jack Szostak, went on to share the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for discoveries about what?
Telomeres
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.
Q 13As a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, Doudna worked with which Nobel laureate?
Thomas Cech
Q 21A visiting scientist's lecture on which disease left the teenage Doudna determined to do research herself?
Cancer
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.'
Q 22The Cas9 protein in Doudna's Nobel-winning work came from the bacterium that causes which illness?
Strep throat
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.
Q 23In nature, CRISPR is an immune system that protects bacteria against what?
Viruses
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.
Q 14Before Doudna's work, CRISPR was first shown to be an immune system by scientists at a firm making cultures for which food?
Yogurt
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.
Q 15In 2018 a scientist in which country announced the first gene-edited babies, the misuse of CRISPR that Doudna had warned against?
China
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.
Q 16Doudna's team found that the RNA enzyme they mapped in the 1990s folds around a core of ions of which metal?
Magnesium
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.
Q 17Doudna joined the faculty of which university as an assistant professor in 1994?
Yale
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.
Q 18Doudna moved to Berkeley in 2002 alongside which person, who also took up a professorship there?
Her husband, Jamie Cate
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.
Q 19Which biotech company did Doudna leave Berkeley for in 2009, returning after two months?
Genentech
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.
Q 20A Berkeley colleague who had never met Doudna found her through what, then introduced her to CRISPR?
A Google search
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.
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.
Q 24The letters CRISPR stand for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic what?
Repeats
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.
Q 25Long before Doudna's work, the DNA pattern later named CRISPR was first spotted in 1987 in which common gut bacterium?
E. coli
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.
Q 26Doudna and Charpentier first met in 2011 at a conference in which place?
San Juan, Puerto Rico
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.
Q 27What is the single synthetic molecule Doudna and Charpentier engineered to tell Cas9 where to cut?
Guide RNA
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.
Q 28Which organisation won the 2017 US patent decision over CRISPR-Cas9 in human cells?
The Broad Institute
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.
Q 29Who became Doudna's rival in the CRISPR patent fight after showing the tool could edit human cells?
Feng Zhang
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.
Q 30Doudna co-founded which company in 2011 to commercialise CRISPR technology?
Caribou Biosciences
Caribou Biosciences was her first company, started with her former graduate student Rachel Haurwitz before the landmark 2012 paper had even appeared.