France’s Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer A. Doudna shared the prize awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. Only five other women had ever received the award since its inception in 1901, bringing the total to seven out of 185 individuals.
Their genome-editing technology, known as Crispr-Cas9, has swept through the life sciences and pharmaceutical industry. Research labs quickly picked up the tool for experiments. And it sparked the creation of innumerable startups, which have attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in search of new cancer, hemophilia and cystic-fibrosis treatments.
Yet the excited embrace of Crispr-Cas9 has also come with costs. The technology, tinkering with the body’s molecular building blocks, raises a host of ethical questions swept aside by a researcher in China who used the tool to gene edit babies, which Chinese authorities said was illegal. (Read More)
