The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

Doudna met Emmanuelle Charpentier at a conference in Puerto Rico in 2011. Charpentier was a nomadic and brilliant French biologist who was also studying CRISPR, and the Cas9 protein in particular. A graduate of the Pasteur Institute, Paris’s famous center for studying infectious diseases, Charpentier had shifted between many countries and universities in her career. When Doudna met her, Charpentier was working at the remote University of Umea in Northern Sweden.

In 2009, while Charpentier was moving from Vienna to Umea, CRISPR researchers were flocking to the Cas9 protein, the same gene Barrangou and Horvath had knocked out to deactivate a bacteria’s immune system. Researchers had established that Cas9 was essential to a bacteria’s CRISPR system. They had also established that two elements formed the core of the CRISPR system. The first was CRISPR-RNAs, or crRNAs, the small snippets of RNA that contain genetic coding from a virus that has invaded the bacteria in the past. The second was the scissor-like Cas enzymes that crRNA guides to attack the virus when it tries to infiltrate the bacteria again.

Meanwhile, in 2010, Charpentier saw a small molecule crop up in the vicinity of CRISPR spacers in her experiment with bacteria.