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This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry is a historic first for women.
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the chemistry award for developing the CRISPR method of genome editing.
It was the first time that a Nobel Prize in science had been awarded to more than one woman, but not men, in a specific category.
This has happened 169 times for multiple men and no women in a specific category since the awards were given starting in 1901.
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In the 120 years of Nobel laureates in medicine, physics and chemistry, the prizes were awarded 599 times to men and 23 times to women.
The prize can be divided into up to three or given to two or just one person. Some people, like Marie Curie, have won more than once and there have been several years where no prizes are awarded.
Susan Walsh / AP
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier (left) and Jennifer Doudna “for the development of a method for genome editing.”
Three other times, a woman won one of the sciences for herself. This has happened to men 147 times.
This means that four times, including this year in chemistry, there have been all-female awards in one of the three sciences and 316 times, including this year in medicine, there have been all-male awards in one of the sciences.
This is also the second time that the one-year science award has been awarded to more than one woman. In 2009, Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider shared the medical award for discovering how chromosomes are protected by telomeres with Jack Szostak.
In 1911, Marie Curie won the Chemistry Prize for the discovery of radium and polonium.
In 1964, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was the only chemistry winner for using X-rays to understand important biochemicals. In 1983, Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of mobile genetic elements.
Women have won the most awards in medicine with 12, seven in chemistry and four in physics.
“For too long, many discoveries made by women have been downplayed and simply not recognized,” said American Chemical Society president Luis Echegoyen, a professor of chemistry at the University of Texas El Paso. “The underrepresentation of women in science has been too clear.”
ADVANCED GENETIC EDITING TOOL
“There is enormous power in this genetic tool,” said Claes Gustafsson, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, speaking of CRISPR.
More than 100 clinical trials are underway to study the use of CRISPR to treat inherited diseases, and “many are very promising,” said Victor Dzau, president of the National Academy of Medicine.
The work has also opened the door to some thorny ethical questions: when editing is done after birth, the alterations are limited to that person. Scientists fear the misuse of CRISPR to create “designer babies” by altering eggs, embryos or sperm – changes that can be passed on to future generations.
Much of the world learned of CRISPR in 2018, when Chinese scientist He Jiankui revealed that it had helped create the world’s first gene-edited babies to try to build resistance to infection with the AIDS virus. His work was denounced as unsafe human experimentation and he has been sentenced to prison in China.
In September, an international panel of experts issued a report saying that it is too early to test such experiments because the science is not advanced enough to guarantee safety.
“Being able to selectively edit genes means that you’re playing God in some way,” said American Chemical Society president Luis Echegoyen, a professor of chemistry at the University of Texas El Paso.
Dr. George Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School, said: “New technologies often present this dichotomy: there is immense potential for human benefit, especially for treating disease, but also the risk of a incorrect “.
However, scientists universally praised the great potential that gene editing has for patients now.
“There is no aspect of biomedical research that has not been touched by CRISPR”, which has been used to design better cultures and try to cure human diseases such as sickle cell anemia, HIV infection and inherited forms of blindness, said Dr. Kiran Musunuru, a genetics expert at the University of Pennsylvania who is researching it for heart disease.
Dr. Francis Collins, who led the push to map the human genome, said technology “has changed everything” about how to tackle diseases with a genetic cause.
“It can draw a direct line from the success of the human genome project to the power of CRISPR-cas to make changes to the instruction book,” said Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, who helped finance Doudna’s work.
