Jennifer Doudna, a UC Berkeley biochemist who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, has been awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement.
President Joe Biden named Doudna and 10 other technology medalists in a White House announcement on Friday, Jan. 3.
Doudna is a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute. At Berkeley, she holds the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biomedical and Health Science and is the executive director of the Li Ka Shing Center for Genomic Engineering.
The medal was established by Congress in 1980 and first awarded in 1985. It is administered by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but is bestowed annually by the president of the United States. In last Friday’s announcement, Biden also named 14 recipients of the National Medal of Science and two organizational recipients of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
“Those who earn these awards embody the promise of America by pushing the boundaries of what is possible,” read a White House announcement about this year’s medalists. “These trailblazers have harnessed the power of science and technology to tackle challenging problems and deliver innovative solutions for Americans and for communities around the world.”
Doudna is the fourth Berkeley faculty member to receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. At least 34 faculty members have received the National Medal of Science.
Doudna and her European colleague and Nobel co-winner, Emmanuelle Charpentier, based their gene-editing technology on CRISPR systems that were discovered in bacteria. The technology has been revolutionary, serving as the basis of many promising medical technologies, including tools to diagnose and treat disease, and has many applications for the development of improved crops, biofuels and bioproducts.
The Food and Drug Administration and regulators in the United Kingdom have already approved a gene therapy treatment that uses CRISPR-Cas9 to treat sickle cell disease. Doudna’s team, through the Innovative Genomics Institute, is collaborating with physicians at UCLA and UCSF’s Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland on research to discover even better CRISPR therapies for sickle cell disease.
