Who is Jennifer Doudna?

Jennifer Doudna is the recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with her assistant Emmanuelle Charpentier, and their work helped lay the groundwork for the development of the Covid-19 vaccine. Just remember that, if your daughters or granddaughters aspire to be chemists. Doudna’s high school counselor told her that girls do not become chemists. Not an awful lot of girls become chemists, true, but this one did, thankfully.

So back to the vaccine–you may have read how the Covid-19 vaccines are a new breed of vaccines. Because of gene editing techniques developed by Doudna and other chemists, RNA can now be edited to instruct our cells to make a harmless protein that is unique to the virus. Once injected by the vaccine that contains the RNA, our cells make copies of the protein and then destroy the genetic material from the vaccine. By that time, the copied protein cells have triggered our immune systems to fight the real virus should we contract it. These mRNA vaccines do not use the live virus that causes Covid-19 nor do the vaccines affect our DNA in any way. One of the reasons the vaccine could be developed so quickly is that gene editing techniques were already available. Once scientists learned the DNA code of the Covid-19 virus, they began on the vaccine.

If you are interested in women scientists and this sort of medical technology, you will be interested in the new book by Walter Isaacson entitled The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. Isaacson has thoroughly researched his subject and gene editing. He writes in such a way that we become absorbed in Doudna’s life and her work and come to appreciate what may be the most significant discovery since the identification of DNA. If you haven’t heard about CRISPR, you will learn all about how Jennifer Doudna developed it!!