Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna: How a curious girl from Hawaii became a science superstar

Note: On Oct. 7, 2020, Jennifer Doudna and her research collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the CRISPR gene-editing technology. “This year’s prize is about rewriting the code of life,” said Goran Hansson, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, as he announced the winners.

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Growing up in Hilo on Hawaii’s Big Island, Jennifer Doudna loved to roam the rainforest around the housing tract where her family lived.

In this wild landscape, exotic mosses and fungi caught her eye. She puzzled over one plant with leaves that folded shut when she touched them. ‘‘I’d look at that and think: Now, how does that work?” she told The New York Times Magazine. “There’s some chemical change that responds to touch that allows these leaves to close. But what is it?’’

As she built a career as a top molecular biologist, Doudna never lost that intense curiosity about how things work in the living world. Along the way, a series of remarkable mentors encouraged her to go where her curiosity carried her.

Now her curiosity has led her to a breakthrough that is revolutionizing biology—the CRISPR gene editing tool. That’s right—an ingenious way to make changes in DNA, the chain of nucleic acid molecules that carries the genetic code in the cells of living things.

DRAWN TO SCIENCE

Doudna was 7 when she moved to Hilo. Her parents taught at local colleges. The tall, blonde Doudna felt like she stood out among her classmates, who were mostly of Asian and Polynesian ancestry. ‘‘I was kind of a nerdy, geeky type,’’ she told the magazine. ‘‘And I loved math. People teased me about it. I felt pretty much like an outcast.’’

She found herself drawn to science. In high school she heard a talk by a young woman scientist on how cells turn cancerous. The subject captivated Doudna, but the scientist herself was even more of a revelation. Doudna realized “that this feminine person was clearly an incredible scientist,” she told California Magazine. “It was an important moment.”

In high school Doudna had a summer job in a biology lab. She relished the messy work of gathering worms and fungus specimens. And she learned to use an electron microscope—a tool that would be crucial in her later discoveries.

TEACHERS AND MENTORS

After high school, Doudna studied biochemistry at Pomona College in California. She worked in the lab of biochemist Sharon Panasenko, an early standout among many teachers who inspired Doudna. “Mentors are critical,” she told California Magazine. “And fortunately for me, I’ve worked with absolutely outstanding scientists at every stage of my career.”

While earning her Ph.D. at Harvard, she worked with Jack Szostak, who later won a Nobel Prize in Medicine. Doudna focused on RNA, a molecule that does a variety of jobs inside cells. Some kinds of RNA carry information from DNA to make proteins, some catalyze chemical reactions, some turn genes on or off, and some block invading microbes.

Dounda did postdoctoral research at the University of Colorado under Tom Cech, a Nobel laureate in Chemistry. In Cech’s lab, Doudna did something researchers had thought was impossible—she used X-ray diffraction to map the structure of a complex RNA molecule.

People who have worked with Doudna say she has a gift for zeroing in on key questions to investigate. “She’s very imaginative and can see possibilities that others don’t,” Cech told California Magazine. “She has an uncanny knack for picking the best experiments to answer a question.”

A POWERFUL TOOL

Doudna joined the faculty at Yale before moving to the University of California at Berkeley in 2002. In 2005 she turned her attention to a new puzzle. She started investigating unusual repeating sequences found in the DNA of some bacteria. These genes—called CRISPR for short—help bacteria fight off invading viruses.

Collaborating with a French geneticist named Emmanuelle Charpentier, Doudna and her team figured out how CRISPR does its job. Then they realized they could put it to work to edit genes. In 2012 they used it to create a tool that can find and snip out any gene in a strand of DNA. It can also insert a new gene between the cut ends.

(See What Is CRISPR? for more on the gene editing tool.)

The discovery is a dream come true for biologists. In her California Magazine interview, Doudna explained why. “We’ve been able to read and write DNA for a long time,” she said. “We have machines to sequence it (read); and to synthesize it (write). What we haven’t been able to do is to rewrite it—to edit it. And now we have a tool that lets you do something about that.”

A STEM ROLE MODEL

Doudna’s discovery has made her a celebrity, at least in the science world. Last year she and Charpentier each received the $3 million Breakthrough Prize from tech industry leaders. Time magazine listed them among the world’s 100 most influential people.

Doudna is married to Dr. Jamie Cate, a biochemistry professor at U.C. Berkeley. They have a teenage son, Andrew. Doudna enjoys gardening and hiking in the Berkeley Hills with her family. Lately, though, it has been harder to find time for those activities amid the whirlwind of CRISPR-related speeches and conferences.

As someone who was inspired by great mentors, Doudna knows that role models are crucial in science. And she realizes that her high profile makes her a powerful example for girls aspiring to STEM careers.

“I think that for a lot of women, there’s a subtle but unfortunately effective discouragement of women pursuing the STEM fields,” she told Huffington Post.

"Women have natural curiosities, as do men,” she added. “And we just want to show women they can pursue these fields and they can be feminine, they can be mothers, they can be wives—they really can do all those things and do it on their own terms.”

Doudna has built her remarkable career on her own terms. And though many now view her as a scientific superstar, she has trouble seeing herself that way.

“I don’t think of myself as a role model, but I can see that I am,” she told The New York Times. “I still think of myself as that person back in Hawaii.”