Biochemist Jennifer Doudna, a faculty scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division and part of the UC Berkeley-based team for m-CAFEs, has received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement. The award is bestowed by the president of the United States on America’s leading innovators.
President Biden named Doudna one of 11 recipients of the medal in a Jan. 3 announcement. Doudna, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute, and a professor at UC Berkeley, was honored for her work developing the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology.
Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Emmanuelle Charpentier for the development of this method for genome editing, which has radically changed genomics research. This technology enables scientists to change or remove genes quickly. Labs worldwide have incorporated this relatively new tool, with huge implications across biology, agriculture, and medicine.
In 2008, Doudna’s nascent research on the function of CRISPR arrays in bacterial genomes and the Cas1 protein was funded by a Department of Energy Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program award through her Berkeley Lab affiliation. Building on findings from this early work and other investigations, Doudna and Charpentier’s research team detailed the underlying mechanisms of the CRISPR-Cas9 system – a component of the bacterial immune system that defends against invading viruses – and explained how it can be programmed to cut DNA at a target sequence. This seminal work was published in the journal Science in 2012.
Today, Doudna’s and Charpentier’s CRISPR-Cas9 technology is the basis of many promising medical technologies, including tools to diagnose and treat disease, and has many applications for the development of improved crops, biofuels, and bioproducts.
Read more in this Berkeley Lab News Center press release and on Berkeley Lab’s Biosciences Area News Center.
