EXCERPT

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna have become world renowned for their discoveries and development involving CRISPR/Cas9, a gene-editing technology that has been called "one of the most important genetic inventions of our time".

In 2014, the duo received the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. The following year, Charpentier and Doudna were also co-awarded the €50,000 Princess of Asturias Award of Technical and Scientific Research – commonly referred to as the "Spanish Nobel Prize". The pair also garnered a nomination for the actual Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Meanwhile, on April 15, 2014, another genetic researcher, Feng Zhang, was awarded something potentially much more valuable than the Nobel Prize: a patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for the very same thing for which Charpentier and Doudna have received so many accolades: using CRISPR/Cas9 to edit genes.