Let's learn about the life of biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who continues her work with the support of her family despite the negative comments around her and won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with the microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier for her genome editing method.
Doudna was born on February 19, 1964, in Washington, D.C. She was born the daughter of her mother, Dorothy Jane Williams, and father, Martin Kirk Doudna. Doudna's father, who received her doctorate degree in English literature from the University of Michigan, was a stay-at-home woman with a master's degree in education. When Doudna was seven, she and her family moved to Hawaii when her father accepted the position at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Doudna's mother earned a second master's degree from the same university and began teaching history at a college.
Growing up in Hawaii, Doudna was fascinated by the island's environmental beauty and developed a sense of wonder towards nature and a desire to understand the biological mechanisms underlying life. This desire, combined with the atmosphere of intellectual pursuit her family fostered at home, became a major source of inspiration for James Watson's 1968 book, "The Double Helix," about the discovery of the structure of DNA, which her father gave when she was in the sixth grade. Doudna, who developed her interest in science and mathematics at school, expressed that she wanted to be a scientist, despite being told "Women do not enter science". Doudna graduated from Hilo High School in 1981, spending a summer working in the Hilo lab of renowned mixologist Don Hemmes at the University of Hawaii.
A graduate student at Pomona College in Claremont, Doudna studied biochemistry there. Doudna, who started her first scientific research in the laboratory of Professor Sharon Panasenko, graduated in 1985 at the undergraduate level in Biochemistry. Choosing Harvard Medical School for her doctoral study, Doudna completed her doctorage degreee in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in 1989.
After her doctorate, Doudna received research fellowships in molecular biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and genetics at Harvard Medical School. From 1991 to 1994, Doudna was a researcher in biomedical science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Here, she worked with chemist Thomas Cech. As of 2022, Doudna's h-index score was recorded as 141 according to Google Scholar and 111 according to Scopus.
Early in her scientific career, Doudna began studies to unravel the structure and biological function of RNA enzymes, or ribozymes. Doudna was able to transform the self-binding "Tetrahymena Group I catalytic intron" into a true catalytic ribozyme that replicates RNA templates. With her focus on engineering ribozymes and understanding their underlying mechanisms, Doudna realized that the failure to see the molecular mechanisms of ribozymes was a big problem. Thomas Cech's lab at the University of Colorado Boulder was involved for the first time to crystallize and determine the three-dimensional structure of a ribozyme. Thus, the ribozyme structure would be comparable to "Enzymes as Catalytic Proteins". Doudna started this project in Cech's lab in 1991, and finished it at Yale University five years later.
Here, Doudna's group succeeded in crystallizing and unraveling the three-dimensional structure of the catalytic core of the "Tetrahymena Group I" ribozyme. Thus, they proved that a core of five magnesium ions clustered in a region of the P4-P6 domain of the ribozyme forms a hydrophobic core around which the rest of the structure can fold. Her group also performed the process of crystallizing many other ribozymes. This initial work of decoding large RNA structures led to further structural studies.
Doudna was promoted to the "Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry" at Yale University in 2000. Between 2000 and 2001, she was also a visiting professor of chemistry at Harvard University.
In 2002, Doudna joined her husband, Jamie Cate, as a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2006, Doudna and CRISPR were introduced to the world of science by professor Jillian Banfield, who did a Google search by typing "RNAi and UC Berkeley" into her browser. In this search, Doudna's name popped up at the top of the list. In 2009, Doudna took a leave of absence to work at Genentech to lead exploratory research, quitting research two months later and leaving Genentech. She then returned to Berkeley with the help of her colleague Michael Marletta.
Doudna founded Caribou Biosciences, a company that will commercialize CRISPR technology, in 2011, and co-founded "Editas Medicine" with Zhang and others in September 2013. However, Doudna, who decided to leave in June 2014, also declined Charpentier's invitation to join "CRISPR Therapeutics".
In 2012, Doudna made the discovery needed to edit genomic DNA based on a protein called "Cas9" found in the Streptococcus bacterial "CRISPR" immune system that cooperates with guide RNA and works like scissors. Although this system has been discovered and characterized before, Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier proved for the first time that they can use different RNAs to program different DNAs to cut and edit.
With CRISPR increasingly being used to edit multicellular organisms, Doudna continued to be asked to serve as a leader in the ethics of modifying an organism's function using this technology. Their discoveries were further developed by many research groups. In addition, a worldwide moratorium has been called for any clinical application of gene editing using CRISPR.
The CRISPR system created a new and simple way to edit DNA, and so there was a rush to patent this technique. Another group filed for patents first at Doudna and her UC Berkeley collaborators. This group patented the technique, claiming they had used it before. Doudna and UC Berkeley filed a lawsuit against the decision, proving, with all the evidence, that she had used this technique before. Thus, the patent covering the general technique was awarded to its original owner in 2018.
During this time, she co-authored the book "A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution" published in 2017. This book became a rare example of a first-person narrative of a major scientific breakthrough aimed at the general public. Doudna also continued her work, discovering that the hepatitis C virus uses an unusual strategy to synthesize viral proteins. This work led to the development of new drugs to stop infections without harming the body's tissues.
That same year, Doudna founded the biotechnology company Mammoth Biosciences, a San Francisco-based bioengineering technology startup. Beginning in March 2020, Doudna organized an initiative to use CRISPR-based technologies to address the COVID-19 outbreak, where they created a testing center with many of her colleagues. As of the same year, Doudna is based in Berkeley, where she directs the "Innovative Genomics Institute," a collaboration between Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Her lab is now working on obtaining a mechanistic understanding of the biological processes involving RNA.
Personal life
Doudna befriended a graduate student at Harvard named Tom Griffin. The couple married in 1988 but divorced a few years later. Later, Doudna met Jamie Cate, who was then a graduate student at the University of Colorado. The couple was involved in studies together, and Doudna came to Yale with Cate. The couple married in Hawaii in 2000 and they have a son, avr, born in 2002.
In 2000, she was honored with the "Alan T. Waterman Award," the National Science Foundation's highest award given to a researcher for determining the structure of a ribozyme. The following year, she won the "Eli Lilly Award" for Biological Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.
In 2015, she won the "Breakthrough Award in Life Sciences" for her contribution to genome editing technology, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, and the "Canada Gairdner International Award" in 2016 with Doudne, Charpentier, Feng Zhang, Philippe Horvath, and Rodolphe Barrangou. She also received the "Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics" in the same year.
In 2018, Doudna made history by being honored with the NAS Award in Chemical Sciences, the Pearl Meister Greengard Award from Rockefeller University, and the Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society. She was also awarded the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience that year. In 2019, she received the Technion/Israel Harvey Award along with Emmanuelle Charpentier and Feng Zhang. Later, she won the LUI Che Woo Award in the Welfare Improvement category. Doudne, who received the Wolf Medicine Prize in 2020 together with Charpentier, added to their success by receiving the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for developing a method for genome editing" together with Charpentier in 2020.
In addition, Doudne was included in Time magazine's "100 most influential people" list in 2015, along with Charpentier. In 2016, Doudne was named 'Person of the Year' by Time magazine along with other CRISPR researchers.