The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to the French Emmanuelle Charpentier and the American Jennifer Doudna.
BREAKING NEWS:
The 2020 #NobelPrize in Chemistry has been awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna “for the development of a method for genome editing.”
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- The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 7, 2020
Emmanuelle Charpentier, 51, is a microbiologist, geneticist and biochemist.
Princess of Asturias Prize for Scientific and Technical Research in 2015, among other distinctions, she invented with Californian Jennifer Doudna a mechanism that had put them, a few years ago, in the line of applicants for the Nobel Prize in medicine.
This award is given to them for "the development of a method of gene editing", with "a tool to rewrite the code of life," said the jury in Stockholm when announcing the award.
The two researchers have discovered CRISPR-Cas9, a mechanism that allows bacteria to protect themselves against viral attacks by a molecular scissor effect.
And that this mechanism was duplicable in the genes of any living organism.
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