Two women win Nobel for ‘genetic scissors’ that can change the code of life

Scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier (L) and Jennifer Doudna (R) become the first women to jointly win the Nobel for Chemistry

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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was for the first time jointly handed to two women on Wednesday for inventing genetic “scissors” that can snip out unwanted DNA and rewrite the code of life.

French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer Doudna share the 10 million Swedish crown (£870,000) prize for developing the Crispr/Cas9 tool to precisely edit the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms.

"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,” said the Nobel jury.

“Only imagination sets the limits for what this chemical tool can be used for in the future,” said Nobel committee member Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede.

Crispr harnesses the immune system of Streptococcus pyogenes, an ancient bacterium that can cause tonsilitis and potentially fatal sepsis in people, which has the ability to “cleave” a precise section of DNA to protect itself from viral attack.

Along with other scientists, the two professors then turned this process into a powerful tool for editing the genome.

Since the breakthrough eight years ago, Crispr has become a research staple in laboratories around the world but its potential is still only starting to be unlocked.

The prospect of it being used to change human evolution at the point of fertilisation — potentially erasing hereditary diseases from the human gene pool but also influencing other traits — has prompted debate over the eugenist perils of “designer” babies.

It is also still hit and miss. Embryos whose DNA was controversially modified by Chinese scientists using the technique suffered from abnormalities.

"The enormous power of this technology means that we need to use it with great care," said Claes Gustafsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

"But it is equally clear that this is a technology, a method that will provide humankind with great opportunities."

Although their tool had been tipped for the prize several times Prof Charpentier said: “When it happens you are very surprised and you feel that it’s not real," she said. "But obviously it is real so I have to get used to it now.”

On the other side of the world, Professor Doudna was “sound asleep” when the call came through.

The Nobel Prize has come in for criticism for failing to reward enough female laureates.

The pair are only the sixth and seventh women to win a Nobel for chemistry, joining Marie Curie, who won in 1911, and more recently, Frances Arnold, in 2018.

Prof Charpentier said she hoped the joint prize would “provide a positive message to the young girls who would like to follow the path of science, and to show them that women in science can also have an impact through the research that they are performing”.