Historical: Two women win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “rewriting the code of life”



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Scientists Emmanuelle Charpientier and Jennifer Doudna are the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry rewriting the “code of life” and “developing a method for genome editing”announced the Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

The Chemistry prize is the last among the scientific prizes of the Nobel round, after the Medicine prize was revealed on Monday and the Physics prize yesterday, Tuesday.

The winners discovered one of the “sharpest tools in gene technology”: genetic scissors CRISPR-Cas9said the Academy, when communicating its decision.

With them, the researchers can change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision.

Carpenter (Juvisy-sur-Orge, France, 1968), is Biochemist and microbiologist specializing in viruses and one of the most innovative researchers in the field of gene therapy which in 2002 established its own working group and which has been linked to different universities in Austria and Germany.

Doudna (Washington DC, 1964), PhD in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard, is Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he also directs the Division of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology.

CRISPR-Cas9 genetic scissors “have revolutionized molecular life sciences, provided new opportunities for plant breeding, are contributing to innovative cancer therapies and can make the dream of curing inherited diseases a reality “added the Swedish academy.

Charpentier and Doudna investigated the immune system of a Streptococcus bacterium and “discovered a molecular tool that can be used to make precise incisions in genetic material, allowing the code of life to be easily changed.”

The two biochemists were awarded in 2015 with the 2015 Princess of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research for developing “a technology that allows to edit genomes in a simple and precise way, and to manipulate the DNA of plants, animals and humans”, the institution highlighted. Spanish.

Tomorrow the one corresponding to Literature will be announced, on Friday the one on Peace will follow and the round will finally be closed with that of Economy, next Monday.

All the prizes include a financial prize, which this year increased to 10 million Swedish crowns -one million more than in 2019- (1,121,533 dollars), to be distributed in the case of more than one winner.

All the awards are given on December 10, the anniversary of the death of the founder, Alfred Nobel, in parallel events in Stockholm, for scientists, literature and economics, while the Peace is held in Oslo.

Both the announcements of the awards and the delivery will be in this edition in a reduced format due to the coronavirus pandemic.



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