Jennifer Doudna is a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. Her groundbreaking development of CRISPR/Cas9 — a genome engineering technology that allows researchers to edit DNA — with collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier earned the two the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and forever changed the course of human and agricultural genomics research. She is also the Founder and the President of the Innovative Genomics Institute, the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Sciences, and a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Gladstone Institutes, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She is a leader in the global public debate on the responsible use of CRISPR and has co-founded and serves on the advisory panel of several companies that use the technology in unique ways. Doudna is the co-author of “A Crack in Creation,” a personal account of her research and the societal and ethical implications of gene editing.

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