All Hail The Gene Queen

Jennifer Doudna has just won the Nobel Prize in chemistry – her discovery of Crispr, the groundbreaking gene-editing tool, is already revolutionising the treatment of disease. But does this brave new world mean a generation of designer superbabies?

- Tom Whipple

When Jennifer Doudna woke up, she realised her phone had been buzzing on and off for some time. It was still dark outside her home in California. In fact, her phone told her that it was 3am. It didn’t cross her mind that in Sweden, it was midday.

She answered. In the blurriness of her waking, she says she did not have an inkling why the world was so keen to speak to her at such a strange time on the first Wednesday in October.

“It was a reporter from Nature magazine. ‘Sorry to bother you so early’, she said. ‘I’d like to ask you your response to the Nobel.’ I thought she was asking me about someone else winning. I said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve just woken up’.”

Unlike almost all other scientific prizes, Nobels are only decided on the morning of the prize. If the committee cannot reach the winners in an hour, they announce regardless.

In Sweden, the Nobel committee had already read out Jennifer’s citation. If she had been listening, she would have learnt she had shared the prize with a French scientist and long-time collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, “for the development of a method for genome editing”.

Another way of describing their work – work that has revolutionised genetics arguably faster than any discovery in history – is that it has given humans the power to control their own evolution.

“Oh my gosh!” said the reporter, realising she’d just broken the news. “You don’t know.”

What follows is a classic example of a perennial feel-good science story: the newly minted laureate in the wrong time zone.