When Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier embarked on the project that would change science and medicine in incalculable ways, their intentions were much more muted. Theirs was a basic research inquiry into bacterial immune systems, not an attempt to develop a new tool to manipulate the genetic code.
Yet their discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9 editing complex, recognized Wednesday with the Nobel Prize in chemistry, has ignited what even scientists allergic to hyperbole routinely call a revolution in how science is conducted. Researchers and companies are regularly discovering new applications in agriculture, diagnostics, and therapeutic development.
“It’s a geneticist’s dream,” said Zachary Lippman, a plant geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
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