Jennifer Doudna

Her father taught American literature at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, and the family moved there from Washington when she was seven. He read popular science for pleasure and left the books around the house. In sixth grade he handed her James Watson's account of the double helix, and she read it as a description of work a person could actually do. Her 10th-grade chemistry teacher at Hilo High, Jeanette Wong, pushed her further, and she spent a summer in a university mycology lab. Then at Pomona College, in freshman general chemistry, she decided she was not good enough for science and planned to switch her major to French. Her French teacher told her to stay where she was.

She spent the first decade of her career on the shapes of RNA. Working with Thomas Cech at Boulder from 1991 and finishing at Yale in 1996, she crystallized the catalytic core of the Tetrahymena Group I ribozyme and showed five magnesium ions clustered in the P4-P6 domain, the first X-ray structure of a large catalytic RNA. In 2006 the Berkeley microbiologist Jillian Banfield found her by typing RNAi and UC Berkeley into a search box, and told her about CRISPR. In 2012 Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier showed that the bacterial enzyme Cas9 could be pointed at any chosen stretch of DNA simply by swapping out the guide RNA. They shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it.

Credit for CRISPR went to court almost at once. Berkeley filed for a patent and so did the Broad Institute, where Feng Zhang edited genes in human cells months after her paper appeared. A US tribunal ruled for the Broad in 2017 and an appeals court affirmed in 2018, holding that Berkeley proposed the human application rather than showing it. Berkeley's broader patent was granted anyway, and in Europe the Broad's claim was thrown out over a procedural defect. Doudna has argued for restraint, joining a 2015 call for a moratorium on clinical germline editing and drawing a public line between edits that stop with the patient and edits that pass to children. She has also co-founded Caribou, Intellia, Mammoth and Scribe, sits on a shelf of corporate advisory boards, and became an investment firm's CRISPR adviser in 2022.

Nothing about her standing is settled, because the work is not finished and she is not done doing it. She still runs the Innovative Genomics Institute she founded at Berkeley in 2014, which turned itself into a testing center in 2020 and processed more than 500,000 COVID samples. The National Inventors Hall of Fame took her in 2023, and in 2025 a supercomputer at Berkeley Lab was named Doudna. What stays argued is whether the Nobel drew its line in the right place, since Yoshizumi Ishino saw the odd repeats in 1987 and Francisco Mojica worked out what they were, and whether the germline boundary she helped draw is going to hold.

Jennifer Doudna's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Structure of the Tetrahymena ribozyme P4-P6 domain discovery
  The first X-ray structure of a large catalytic RNA 1996
• Programmable CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing discovery
  With Emmanuelle Charpentier. One guide RNA, aimed at any chosen DNA sequence. 2012
• Caribou Biosciences company
  The first company she founded to commercialize CRISPR 2011
• Innovative Genomics Institute company
  A Berkeley and UCSF center for genome editing in health, agriculture and climate 2014
• A Crack in Creation book
  Written with Samuel Sternberg, a first-person account of the discovery for general readers 2017
• Mammoth Biosciences company
  CRISPR-based diagnostics, including a rapid point-of-need COVID-19 test 2017

• 1971 aged ~7 Moves to Hilo when her father takes a teaching post there He later gave her The Double Helix, which she read as a job description.
• 1981 aged ~17 Graduates from Hilo High School
• 1989 aged ~25 Takes a PhD at Harvard under Jack Szostak Her thesis engineered a self-replicating catalytic RNA.
• 1996 aged ~32 Solves the structure of a ribozyme's catalytic core at Yale The project had begun in Thomas Cech's Boulder lab five years earlier.
• 2002 aged ~38 Moves to UC Berkeley with her husband Jamie Cate
• 2006 aged ~42 Jillian Banfield finds her through a web search and introduces her to CRISPR
• 2012 aged ~48 With Charpentier, shows Cas9 can be programmed to cut chosen DNA
• September 2018 aged 54 An appeals court affirms the Broad Institute's CRISPR patent Berkeley's own patent on the general technique was granted separately.
• October 7, 2020 aged 56 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier

• James Watson 1928–2025
  Co-discoverer of the DNA double helix structure, earning a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. wrote the book that started her
• Frances Arnold b. 1956
  Chemical engineer who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for directed evolution of enzymes. earlier American woman to win the chemistry Nobel
• Barbara McClintock 1902–1992
  Cytogeneticist who discovered transposable elements and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. read genomes closely a generation earlier
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. the precedent for scientists asking for limits
• Rachel Carson 1907–1964
  Marine biologist whose book Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement. earlier argument about technology and consent