When I was in graduate school, we were going after this question of could RNA be capable of self-replication? In other words, could it make copies of itself? Well, how are you going to study that experimentally? Fortunately, Jack was very much aligned with the work that was going on in the lab of Tom Cech at the time, using the Tetrahymena ribozyme. Tetrahymena is a small, single-celled organism that his lab had been studying for actually completely different reasons, but they ended up finding an example of an RNA called a self-splicing intron that has chemical properties that allow it to cut and ligate back together molecules of RNA. And so, in a way, it had the chemical capabilities, the catalytic capabilities that you would need to copy RNA molecules, it just didn't happen to be using its chemistry to do that. So that was really my project, was to ask, could we take the intrinsic chemical properties of a self-splicing intron and change things around so that what it's using its chemical properties to do is actually to synthesize segments of DNA? And remarkably, that worked. It actually worked, so it was one of these crazy projects that really panned out.

The techniques we were using to pursue that project involved a lot of biochemistry. We were purifying molecules of RNA. We were using molecular cloning to make copies of them and engineer bacteria to make copies of them, but a lot of what we were doing was quite chemical in nature because, in those days, I was actually trying to figure out the details of how the chemical reaction catalyzed by the Tetrahymena ribozyme actually worked. So, I loved it, it was exactly what I wanted to be doing. I was using chemistry and chemical principles, but really targeted towards a very fundamental question of biology, which is how did life get started?

Dr. Jennifer Doudna is a biochemist and 2020 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. She is also the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health sciences as well as a professor of biochemistry, biophysics, and structural biology. Her work focuses on RNA interference and gene editing.

In 1985, she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in biochemistry from Pomona College and in 1989 received her PhD in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard Medical School. From 1991 to 1994, she was a Lucille P. Markey post-doctoral scholar in Biomedical science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She also received fellowships from the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

From 1994 to 2001, Dr. Doudna was an associate professor and full professor at Yale University. In 2002, Dr. Douda accepted a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology position at the University of California, Berkeley. She has also been researching with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997, and her work with CRISPR-Cas9 and other genome-engineering techniques has led to breakthroughs in human and agricultural genomics research. At the Doudna Lab, researchers focus on determining mechanisms of novel genome editing tools for in vitro usage in plants and mammals as well as anti-CRISPR agents.

Dr. Doudna has received numerous awards for her work including the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a method for genome editing, the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the 2016 Japan Prize, the 2019 Welfare Betterment Prize, the 2020 Wolf Prize in Medicine, and the 2025 National Medal of Technology and Innovation. She is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Inventors, and a member of the Royal Society.