Science News StaffThe Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to the two scientists who transformed an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, most commonly called CRISPR, into a tool that can simply and cheaply edit the genomes of everything from wheat to mosquitoes to humans.
The award went jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier of Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens and Jennifer A. Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley "for the development of a method for genome editing." But the Nobel committee did not include Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, who led the work that resulted in the first published evidence that CRISP could edit DNA in mammalian cells.