Emmanuelle Charpentier of France and Jennifer A Doudna of the United States won the Nobel Chemistry Prize on Wednesday for developing the gene-editing technique known as the CRISPR-Cas9 DNA snipping ‘scissors’.
“Using these, researchers can change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision. This technology has had a revolutionary impact on the life sciences, is contributing to new cancer therapies and may make the dream of curing inherited diseases come true,” the Nobel jury said.
The recipients were announced in Stockholm by Goran Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
In 2009, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Indian-born physicist and molecular biologist was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with American biophysicist and biochemist Thomas Steitz and Israeli protein crystallographer Ada Yonath, for his research into the atomic structure and function of cellular particles called ribosomes.
Ramakrishnan was born in 1952 in Tamil Nadu. He earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from Baroda University in Gujarat, and in 1976 he received a doctoral degree in physics from Ohio University in the United States.
