The Swedish Academy of Sciences has selected the French Emmanuelle Charpentier and the American Jennifer A. Doudna “for the development of a method for editing the genome.” It is one of the five Nobel prizes established in the testament of the Swedish chemist and inventor Alfred Nobel, in 1895.
“Since Charpentier and Doudna discovered CRISPR / Cas9 genetic scissors in 2012, their use has exploded. Genetic scissors have brought the life sciences into a new era and, in many ways, are bringing the greatest benefit to humanity. “, explains the academy in a statement.
“Thanks to one of the sharpest tools in gene technology, researchers can change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision. This technology has had a revolutionary impact on the life sciences, it is contributing to new cancer therapies and can make the dream of curing hereditary diseases come true, “ continue spokespersons for the Swedish academy.
In 2019, the American John B. Goodenough, the British Stanley Whittingham and the Japanese Akira Yoshino received the chemistry award “for the development of lithium-ion batteries.”
“They have laid the foundations for a fossil fuel-free and wirelessly connected society” and “are of the greatest benefit to humanity” for current and future generations, the Swedish academy noted last year in its official statement.
One of the winners, the American John B. Goodenough , also became the oldest person to receive a Nobel Prize at the age of 97 .
The Swedish Academy of Sciences is the body that decides each year who is awarded the Chemistry Prize based on proposals received from academic institutions around the world. The maximum number of people that can receive the same Nobel is precisely three, who will share the nine million Swedish crowns (about 855,000 euros) with which the award is endowed this year.
Presence of women in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Again we will find minimum figures. Since the Swedish Academy began to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901, 186 people have won it, of which only seven are women: Marie Curie in 1911 (“for her discovery of radium and polonium”), Irène Joliot-Curie in 1935 (“For her synthesis of new radioactive elements”), Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in 1964 (“for determining the structures of important biochemical substances by means of X-ray techniques”), Ada E. Yonath in 2009 (“ for the study of the structure and function of ribosomes ”), Frances Arnold in 2018 (“ for the directed evolution of enzymes ”) and in 2020 Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna (“ for the development of a method for editing the genome ”).
This is the third of the awards we know in this special edition of the 2020 Awards due to the coronavirus pandemic that plagues the entire world, after those of Medicine and Physics.
