Emmanuelle Charpentier

Well, I think that's a really interesting consideration because actually the Nobel Prize was won by two amazing female scientists for the discovery of CRISPR.

So that was Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier.

And at that time, I got super lucky, Sharon, because it was really the advent of gene editing and its deployment in therapeutic applications.

And so I got lucky, as a lot of people do.

To disarm them, it uses that immune system called CRISPR-Cas to chop up viral DNA.

And in 2020, scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for figuring out how to harness that powerful immune system into a gene editing tool called CRISPR-Cas9.

Here's how it works.

Scientists identify a section of DNA that they want to alter, create a short guide sequence that matches that DNA, and then CRISPR-Cas9 binds to that section and either cuts it out or activates specific genes.

There is a lot of talk in the media about CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology.

Emmanuel Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna earned a Nobel Prize in 2020 for their groundbreaking research here.

This started with a bacterium that causes throat infections, Streptococcus pyogenes.

Charpentier was investigating the actions of bacteriophages, viruses that attack bacteria.

... which came out in twenty twenty.

It literally came out on the eve of the Nobel Prizes to Jennifer Doudna and, uh, Emmanuelle Charpentier.

That's right.

I remember that.