Gene editing pioneers win Nobel Prize in chemistry
07 October 2020
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for their work developing the gene editing tool CRISPR.
Why it matters: Gene editing could transform biology and medicine with its wide-ranging applications for understanding and treating disease, optimizing crops and eradicating pests. But its potential use in treating human diseases by changing genes that can be inherited raises major ethical questions that will challenge scientists for decades.
The backdrop: Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, are sequences of genetic code that bacteria evolved to find and target invading viruses.
- In 2012,Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley and Charpentier, a microbiologist now at the Max Plank Institute for Infection Biology, reported CRISPR can be programmed to lead enzymes to genetic sequences that the enzyme then precisely snips or edits, turning it on or off or changing its function.
Between the lines: Doudna and Charpentier have been considered top candidates for the prize for several years but there's an ongoing fight over patents for CRISPR and its use.
- Other researchers, including Feng Zheng of the Broad Institute at MIT, have made key contributions to gene editing as well but were not recognized by the Nobel committee.
- Berkeley and MIT have battled for years over the patent rights to CRISPR, though it's unclear how the Nobel will affect the legal fight.
What to watch: Earlier this week, Doudna launched Scribe Therapeutics, a startup that aims to use engineered CRISPR molecules and delivery technologies to edit cells while they are in the body. (Other approaches remove cells from the body, edit them and reintroduce them.)
- Scribe, which is collaborating with Biogen, is looking to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) first, per FierceBiotech.
Of note: "The award smashed records and made scientific history as the only science Nobel ever won by two women," Sharon Begley writes in STAT.
- Just seven women have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and only 22 have won in the sciences altogether — including Andrea Ghez, who co-won the Nobel Prize in physics this week.
Go deeper:
Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times
Section2Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.
Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.
The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.
- The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.
What the transcripts say:
- Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
- The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
- Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."
Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.