Nordic Life Science 1
“Because it seemed to use a mechanism similar to
RNA interference, that is how I got curious and started working on CRISPR in my own lab,” she says. In 2011, another defining event took place in Jennifer’s career. During a microbiology conference in Puerto Rico she met Emmanuelle Charpentier. The passion and excitement that her future collaborator exuded was contagious and Doudna and Charpentier decided to work together on the mysterious Cas9. “There was no way to know what was going to become of our collaboration, but when she and I met, and she told me that she was excited that I wanted to work with her on “the mysterious Cas9 enzyme” I remember having a gut feeling that we were going to do something interesting together.” Jennifer and Emmanuelle, along with their colleagues, discovered how bacteria use the CRISPR/Cas 9 system to protect themselves from viruses, and then showed how the defense system could be turned into a “cut and paste” tool for editing gene sequences. The implications of what a genome editing tool like CRISPR/Cas9 could do hit her all at once, says Doudna. “I won’t claim to have seen everything that was coming, because I’m surprised every day. But I remember being at home cooking dinner when the magnitude of what it could mean came over me and I started laughing. It was a joyous feeling.” The ease of use is one of the things that makes CRISPR/Cas9 so remarkable, says Doudna, and what Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna receiving the Japan Prize 2017. NORDICLIFESCIENCE.ORG 57