Year: 2020

Charpentier and Doudna win the Chemistry Nobel

Charpentier Doudna

Doudna & Charpentier share the 2020 Chemistry Nobel prize for their work on CRISPR-Cas9. Only 7 women have won the award to date.

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier have won the Nobel prize in chemistry this year for their work on CRISPR-Cas9.  There work has led to the development of widely used genome editing tools that work in virtually any type of cell. It has already generated therapies for sickle-cell anemia, some cancers and even blindness.

Doudna is a Howard Hughes Investigator at the University of California, Berkeley while, Charpentier is with the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin. There have been over 185 chemistry Nobel prize winners, but before the two won the prize this year, only five had gone to women.

Read the official announcement and learn more about their research here

black chemists to know

Black African American Scientists Chemist

Alice Ball researched leprosy at the University of Hawaii.

Black history month is coming to a close and ACS’s publication C&EN published a list of  9 African American scientists who were pioneers in their fields of chemistry. It features scientists like Alice Ball who studied leprosy at the University of Hawaii, and Samuel Massie who contributed to the Manhattan project developing the atomic bomb. Notably four of the scientists are women, highlighting the contribution of black women to STEM. Read the article to find out about the 5 men and 4 women and their contributions to chemistry.

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