But for many female researchers, who are in a minority in most fields, navigating this landscape can be tricky. Doudna, like many other scientists who spoke to Nature, says that gender plays no part in who she chooses to collaborate with or recruit into her lab. “Because we worked in time zones 9 hours apart, the project progressed quickly, in part because one of us was always working.”Ĭollaborations, particularly across disciplines, are increasingly necessary for performing quality science and for career advancement. “I loved her intensity and quiet sense of humour,” Doudna adds. Their complementary scientific expertise and commitment to the collaboration made the work enjoyable.
Aside from winning science’s top medal, Doudna calls the collaboration with Charpentier “one of the great joys of my life”. In 2020, Doudna and Charpentier became the first all-female team to win a Nobel prize, and only the second winning team to include more than one woman. The technique is now used to genetically modify organisms for everything from routine laboratory research to agricultural uses and cancer therapies. Over the next year, they adapted the CRISPR system to edit DNA in any species. Charpentier, a microbiologist, was at Umeå University in Sweden at the time. The two women began working together across fields and continents - Doudna is a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “She was coming to CRISPR from a very different perspective than I was,” Doudna says. Nobel laureates Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier first met at a 2011 conference in Puerto Rico, where both gave talks about a then little-known biological system called CRISPR–Cas9, which bacteria use as an immune defence. Emmanuelle Charpentier (left) and Jennifer Doudna (right) won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry - the first all-female team to win a Nobel.