Jennifer Doudna develops precise genome editing tools
Jennifer Doudna developed a precise method for editing genomes at the University of California, Berkeley in California.
Doudna felt like an outsider during her childhood in Hawaii and found comfort in reading scientific books about DNA discovery. She enrolled at Pomona College to study chemistry and later struggled before discovering her passion for organic chemistry subjects.
Her graduate work at Harvard Medical School focused on RNA roles in life origins under the guidance of Nobel laureate Jack W. Szostak. This bold shift away from DNA research initially led to rejection but eventually produced significant results published in 1989.
At the lab of Thomas Cech at the University of Colorado Boulder, she solved complex challenges regarding the three-dimensional shape of RNA. Later, researchers at Yale University published a paper describing a large ribozyme capable of replicating itself for the first time.
While studying microbial defense mechanisms at Berkeley, she discovered CRISPR sequences that allowed bacteria to remember and fight previous viral attacks. She identified proteins acting as chemical cleavers that could cut unwanted DNA and investigated how this process occurs naturally.