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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020
- jibolso 6y agoThe CRISPR/Cas9 technique is so ground breaking. I am not surprised.
- pseudolus 6y agoThere's a documentary on Netflix "Human Nature" that discusses the history of CRISPR and features interviews with both Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna. [0][1][2] [0] https://www.netflix.com/title/81220944 https://www.netflix.com/title/81220944 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1UkCfDnn6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1UkCfDnn6c [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Nature_(2019_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Nature_(2019_film)
- jcims 6y agoI've heard a number of interviews/podcasts with Jennifer 'The Dude' Doudna about CRISPR/Cas9 over the years. Usually a great listen, she's pretty funny and from all indications has that great combo of taking her work seriously but not herself.
- RoutinePlayer 6y agoThe part of the documentary where she relates the Hitler dream, weighing in on the impact of her work is a poignant moment. A very responsible scientist.
- rerx 6y agoIt's not on Netflix Germany.
- julienchastang 6y agoIt was also broadcast through PBS NOVA here in the US (and it is available on PBS Passport -- that is how I watched it). In fact, I thought it was a PBS NOVA episode, but it is apparently an independent film.
- russellbeattie 6y agoI haven't seen it yet, but there's a new Nova episode about CRISPR I've been meaning to watch: "CRISPR Gene-Editing Reality Check". https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/gene-editing-reality-check/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/gene-editing-reality-che... (Does Berkeley still have parking spots reserved for Nobel Laureates? They'll have to add a new one...)
- ckemere 6y agoWhat about Feng Zhang?
- Ovah 6y agoI'm open to pushback. Nobel prizes usually reward basic science over applications thereof. My understanding is that Feng Zhang didn't discover anything fundamental. Sure, he was first with applying CRISPR to eucaryotic cells. Which indeed is an impressive feat: not because it was a huge theoretical leap but because of his labs strong work ethic managing to do so very quickly.
- j7ake 6y agoIf that were the case then the prize should have been awarded to Yoshimuzi Ishino and Francisco Mojica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR#Repeated_sequences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR#Repeated_sequences). This prize was specifically for a new method for gene editing. Doudna, Charpentier, Zhang won joint prizes before for gene editing: Gairdner, Harvey, and Gabbay awards. If Zhang was included in the Nobel prize, nobody would ask why he was included. But excluding definitely raises questions on why.
- natechols 6y agoDidn't Church's very similar paper come out at the same time as Zhang's?
- jtitor 6y agoI think many people have similar ideas around the same time: Charpentier, Doudna, Zhang, Šikšnys etc. Zhang is the lastest to publish the result, but got the furtherest along in applying to human. I don't think anyone believes Zhang's work is based off others.
- dm8 6y agoSo CRISPR/Cas9 Nobel was a given since their breakthrough papers in 2011/2012. Lot of folks were speculating whether it will win in Chemistry or Medicine. Maybe Zhang/Church will win it in Medicine in few years. Also given the revolutionary nature of this technology, there could be be more Nobel prizes in this area in coming years
- QuesnayJr 6y agoThis is one of the most inevitable Nobels in recent memory. The only question was whether they would win it in Chemistry or Medicine.
- rjtavares 6y agoMakes sense to give it to Chemestry first, but my guess is they'll win both.
- samatman 6y agoThat would be an interesting development! I believe that to date, Madame Curie stands alone in having won Nobel Prizes in more than one field.
- yesbabyyes 6y agoLinus Pauling too (perhaps even more notable, as he shared none of the prizes). But neither won prizes in different fields for the same work, which would be quite unexpected.
- sradman 6y agoTo Emmanuelle Charpentier [1] and Jennifer A. Doudna [2] for CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuelle_Charpentier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuelle_Charpentier [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Doudna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Doudna [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR_gene_editing
- Fission 6y agoThere was a really interesting debate here on who should get credit for the patent (Charpentier & Doudna vs. Feng Zhang and to a lesser extent George Church, i.e. discovery + characterization vs. making things practical). I find it interesting, but not surprising, to see that only the former are getting the Nobel Prize.
- adventured 6y agoIt's a reasonably segmented group. Charpentier and Doudna deserve the breakthrough credit they're getting. Individually Feng Zhang did more to push CRISPR forward than anyone else has thus far. And George Church has had his hands all over the space for a very long time, while not fitting into either of the prior two groups. It's so big it more than requires all of them, contributing in the ways they have (along with countless others, less heralded, at places like Berkeley or Broad).
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- divbzero 6y agoGeorge Church praised the Nobel committee’s choice and noted that there are plenty of ideas and companies to go around [1]. I wouldn’t be surprised if CRISPR in medical applications leads to future Nobel prizes, and there will be many winners on the commercial side (e.g. Editas cofounded by Church, Doudna, Zhang and others [2]). [1]: https://www.statnews.com/2020/10/07/a-terrific-choice-george-church-salutes-fellow-crispr-pioneers-historic-nobel-win/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/10/07/a-terrific-choice-george... [2]: https://www.genengnews.com/topics/genome-editing/zhang-church-doudna-and-others-found-gene-editing-startup/ https://www.genengnews.com/topics/genome-editing/zhang-churc...
- _Wintermute 6y agoMaybe a bit premature, but I'm glad this is going to Charpentier and Doudna rather than Zhang and the Broad.
- nextaccountic 6y agoWhy?
- _Wintermute 6y agoBecause they really showed their ugly side when it came to commercialization and the patent court case.
- sarthakjshetty 6y agoSorry, I'm out of the loop on this. Can you explain it a bit more? I was aware of the lawsuit between Berkeley and MIT over the patent, but not of the specifics.
- PL1 6y agoFor instance, see http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825 http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825
- dannykwells 6y agoNot that Michael is biased at all, either... Anyway, I'm happy Jennifer and Emmanuelle won over others and thinks this was the right call. The discovery of the idea was the most important part here, bs showing it in human cells (which wasn't that hard afterwards).
- natechols 6y agoIt wasn't just that, it was the entire hype machine. Lots of schadenfreude going around today. I probably would have preferred they split the CRISPR award across chemistry and medicine prizes, but life isn't fair.
- Davidzheng 6y agoI'll leave the scientific explanation links to people who know more but here's a fun song about this https://youtu.be/k99bMtg4zRk https://youtu.be/k99bMtg4zRk
- dbcooper 6y agoWow, neither Feng Zhang nor one of the earlier people in the discovery chain.
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- borjah 6y agoThere are a more essential researchers than Charpentier and Doudna to understand the evolution of CRISP. The Nobel playing politics instead of science
- dm8 6y agoThoroughly deserved. 9 years since publishing their paper in Nature. CRISPR/Cas9 is that revolutionary. Is that the fastest Nobel since breakthrough/discovery? Or was it Graphene Nobel (albeit in Physics) in 2010? EDIT: Looks like fastest Nobel prize since discovery was in 1987 (in Physics) - for high temperature super conductivity. Bednorz and Mueller won their Nobel within 2 years (!!!!!) Ref - https://science.sciencemag.org/content/238/4826/481 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/238/4826/481
- kryptiskt 6y agoYang and Lee got it 1957 for parity violation, work that they did in 1956 and which was experimentally confirmed the same year by Wu (who should have gotten a share, I think).
- cosmic_quanta 6y agoWasn't the Nobel awarded for the observation of gravitational waves 1 year after the publication in Physical Review Letters? Edit: here's the paper (2016) https://physics.aps.org/featured-article-pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102 https://physics.aps.org/featured-article-pdf/10.1103/PhysRev...
- est31 6y agoThe discovery is beyond doubt deserving of the award. It was also awarded only 8 years after the publication. It's a bit sad though that Virginijus Šikšnys didn't get any credit for the discovery, because his paper sent over a month earlier was rejected by Cell. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginijus_%C5%A0ik%C5%A1nys#Publication_of_CRISPR-Cas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginijus_%C5%A0ik%C5%A1nys#P... Edit: The Nobel award paper writes this on his findings: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2020/10/advanced-chemistryprize2020.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2020/10/advanced-chemistr... > Similar findings were also published in another report using the related CRISPR-Cas system in Streptococcus. As in Charpentier and Doudna’s work, this report also demonstrated that Cas9 cleaves within the protospacer, that cleavage specificity is directed by the crRNA sequence, and that the two nuclease domains within Cas9, each cleave one strand. However, the researchers did not notice the crucial importance of tracrRNA for sequence-specific cleavage of target DNA [29]. So I guess it's a bit more complicated than just having missed the publication.
- tuxxy 6y agoWhy is academia (at least in the physical sciences) so competitive? My partner is a molecular biologist and she can't collaborate with anyone outside of her lab because of the fear that they collaborators will take their research before they get a chance to publish it. It seems this method of performing groundbreaking research and science is horrifically detrimental to our collective progress. There's no reason for these groups to compete when they could collaborate.
- FeistyOtter 6y agoIsn't it because right now research is basically a zero sum game? A government sets a budget for research, so the more and the better papers the other lab publishes, the more funding they get and less funding YOUR lab gets.
- orbifold 6y agoExactly, it encourages mafia like structures. It matters a ton who you know and who your PI was as a Postdoc and PhD.
- mbrundle 6y agoFor anyone interested in learning more, I highly recommend Doudna’s book, “A Crack in Creation” - very readable explanation of the process leading to discovering CRISPR/Cas9. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crack-Creation-Editing-Unthinkable-Evolution/dp/0544716949/ref=nodl_ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crack-Creation-Editing-Unthinkable-...
- pessimist 6y agoPoor Virginijus Šikšnys, left out because the journal he sent it to rejected without review his paper which was sent before Doudna and Charpentier's. https://www.statnews.com/2018/05/31/crispr-scientists-kavli-prize-nanoscience/ https://www.statnews.com/2018/05/31/crispr-scientists-kavli-... "But bad luck with a journal made Šikšnys the forgotten man of CRISPR: Cell rejected his paper in April 2012 without sending it out for peer review. In contrast, when Doudna, Charpentier, and their colleagues showed that Cas9 could be programmed to cut DNA, their paper sped through the review process at Science and was published online in late June 2012. Šikšnys and his co-authors, meanwhile, had scrambled to find a more receptive journal and landed at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which published their paper three months after the Berkeley team’s."
- jray 6y agoPoor Francisco Mojica Francisco Juan Martínez Mojica (Elche, October 5, 1963), usually known as Francisco JM Mojica, is a Spanish scientist, molecular biologist, and microbiologist at the University of Alicante in Spain, known for his discovering research on the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats-CRISPR gene editing technique.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Mojica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Mojica
- Upvoter33 6y agoI don't think it's a case of "poor" Mojica. He discovered some important properties around the palindromic nature of DNA in bacteria, as did others in Japan. While it was important, it is not the same level of contribution as Doudna and Charpentier. I don't think that there is much debate around this.
- fgblanch 6y agoI disagree, he did not discovered a property, he discovered and described the CRISPR mechanism. He deserves a big part of the credit, without CRISPR there is no CRISPR-cas9. With this award, they are neglecting basic research and just rewarding the applications. Btw I highly recommend to read the Mojica story it is fascinating how he found it and understood how it worked.
- sampo 6y agoI got interested in how often the chemistry prize goes to biology/biochemistry. 2011: quasicrystals →2012: G protein-coupled receptors 2013: modelling complex chemical systems 2014: super-resolved fluorescence microscopy →2015: studies of DNA repair 2016: molecular machines 2017: cryo-electron microscopy for biomolecules →2018: directed evolution of proteins 2019: lithium ion batteries →2020: genome editing So let's say 4 out of 10 (2012, 2015, 2018, 2020). My initial assumption that biology would dominate was wrong, and the chemistry prize seems to have been going to very diverse topics in chemistry.
- divbzero 6y agoThe prizes in 2014 (fluorescence microscopy) and 2017 (cryo-electron microscopy) weren’t strictly for biology but were tools for studying biology. Including them would make it 6 out of 10.
- The_rationalist 6y agoWhat's missing for reseting all / most of the DNA from an organ/a whole body in mammals?? Just reseting the DNA repair section of the DNA of a whole organ would enable massively slowing the ageing/cancer risks of said organ/body! It is the key towards rejuvenation and preventing cancer, heizeimer and most diseases! I can't find a good resource on why this is not currently possible and where can I track scientific incremental progress towards making this breakthrough a reality, which would then become the biggest technological progress of the 21 century! Why aren't an enormous amount (and diluted over days or months) of viral vectors enough? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector#:~:text=Viral%20vectors%20are%20tools%20commonly,inside%20the%20cells%20they%20infect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_vector#:~:text=Viral%2....
- flobosg 6y agoDon't underestimate the complexity of biological systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy#Hurdles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy#Hurdles
- haihaibye 6y agoYou have trillions of cells, each that contain billions of bases. Each cell can go wrong in its own way, and what you have to patch it back to is different for every person All of these steps are currently not possible: * establish a perfect sequence for an individual * find mutations non-destructively (ie cell survives) * send a specific edit to a specific cell in live animal * perform just that modification (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-target_genome_editing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-target_genome_editing)
- flobosg 6y agoVery deserved. This is, I think, the first time in the Nobel's history where a shared prize has only female laureates.
- code4tee 6y agoThis is interesting on several fronts. One because it’s a really cool discovery. But two because the Nobel tends to avoid situations where the full origin of the discovery is somewhat in dispute until things settle down. If you know the history here this is very much an active source of debate and the Nobel clearly picked sides here, which is interesting in its own right.
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- k0dede 6y agoThis guy learn it and use it on human DNA modification. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui Sent to jail