Full Name
Jennifer Doudna
Job Title
Biochemist and co-inventor of CRISPR genome editing technology
Company
Featured in Spotlight on: CRISPR
Brief Biography
As an internationally renowned professor of chemistry and molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, Dr. Jennifer A. Doudna and her colleagues rocked the research world in 2012 by first describing a simple way of editing the DNA of any organism using an RNA-guided protein found in bacteria. This powerful technology, called CRISPR-Cas9, has enormous potential in agriculture and in curing serious human diseases, including cancer.
She is a vocal proponent of its responsible use, first calling for a moratorium on using CRISPR technology to make permanent to the human germline in 2015. Doudna’s early guidance for more research and discussion came to the fore in the “CRISPR babies” announcement of late 2018, when she and other leaders in the field expressed horror at a Chinese scientist’s claim of creating twin “designer babies” in an experiment flawed in both ethics and science.
Doudna is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, senior investigator at Gladstone Institutes, and the Executive Director of the Innovative Genomics Institute. She co-founded and serves on the advisory panel of several companies that use CRISPR technology in unique ways, including Inari, Synthego, Mammoth Biosciences and Caribou Biosciences.
She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Doudna is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Society and has received numerous other honors including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Japan Prize, Kavli Prize, and Wolf Prize. Doudna’s work led TIME to recognize her as one of the “100 Most Influential People” in 2015 and a runner-up for “Person of the Year” in 2016. She is the co-author of “A Crack in Creation,” a personal account of her research and the societal and ethical implications of gene editing.
She is a vocal proponent of its responsible use, first calling for a moratorium on using CRISPR technology to make permanent to the human germline in 2015. Doudna’s early guidance for more research and discussion came to the fore in the “CRISPR babies” announcement of late 2018, when she and other leaders in the field expressed horror at a Chinese scientist’s claim of creating twin “designer babies” in an experiment flawed in both ethics and science.
Doudna is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, senior investigator at Gladstone Institutes, and the Executive Director of the Innovative Genomics Institute. She co-founded and serves on the advisory panel of several companies that use CRISPR technology in unique ways, including Inari, Synthego, Mammoth Biosciences and Caribou Biosciences.
She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Doudna is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Society and has received numerous other honors including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Japan Prize, Kavli Prize, and Wolf Prize. Doudna’s work led TIME to recognize her as one of the “100 Most Influential People” in 2015 and a runner-up for “Person of the Year” in 2016. She is the co-author of “A Crack in Creation,” a personal account of her research and the societal and ethical implications of gene editing.
