Mauna Loa, Earth’s largest active volcano, slopes gently upward toward the sky, standing as the backdrop for the small coastal town of Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii. This island is where a young Jennifer Doudna used to hike with her family, watching lava flows, adventuring among the native flora and fauna, and viewing the tropical birds fluttering about.

Technically, Doudna, the 2026 Priestley Medalist and winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was born in Washington, DC. But Hawaii is the place that fills Doudna with a sense of reverence and solemnity that one can hold only for a home long since moved away from.

“I deeply love Hawaii. I love the culture there. It’s a very special place,” she says. “I’m fascinated by the history there, not only the sociology and kind of the people and the populations but also the natural history.”

Island ecosystems are notable to those who study biology. The isolation and containment of an island can create a natural laboratory in which the shape and form of creatures shift over the years in response to evolutionary pressures. There’s a reason Charles Darwin was able to surmise the processes of evolution and natural selection while voyaging through the Galápagos Islands.

And the environment of Hawaii helped shape Doudna’s own pursuit of science. Her work determining the molecular mechanism of CRISPR and its powerful gene-editing capabilities have helped unlock a new evolutionary era—one in which humanity has developed its own highly targeted evolutionary force and gained direct control over its genetic destiny. Yet Doudna is remarkably humble—she is quick to credit the countless others who played vital roles developing CRISPR. And her innate belief that a great scientist can come from anywhere fuels her passion for mentorship.

“I’m just really honored,” she says of receiving this year’s Priestley Medal. “I certainly didn’t start out in my career thinking I’m doing this to win prizes.”

Instead, the award-winning mindset that Doudna first had as a student and has maintained throughout her scientific career is an honest and simple one. “This is fun. I want to do more of this.”

Finding the path to biochemistry

For all Doudna’s success, her journey is filled with as much struggle and doubt as it is filled with good fortune.

When it came time for Doudna to apply for college, her parents insisted she get the same kind of liberal arts education they had. Instead of an expensive set of college visits around the contiguous US, Doudna flipped through glossy college brochures, looking at campus photos and interrogating the courses on offer until eventually stumbling across Pomona College in California.

While Pomona had no biochemistry major, “they had a biochemistry course, and they just hired a new professor in biochemistry,” Doudna says. “I ended up getting a full scholarship, you know, so that kind of settled the question.”

At 17 years old, moving from Hilo to just outside of Los Angeles was a “huge culture shock” for Doudna. “I felt totally unprepared and totally over my head,” she says. “Everybody else seemed to be a lot more sophisticated than me. . . . I had grown up in such a different place.”

And she found that her first-year general chemistry course was far from a grounding force that fostered a passion for science. Doudna started to doubt she was naturally suited for science.

First, Doudna considered switching to a French major, and then, in the first summer after starting college, she considered leaving Pomona entirely and moving back closer to home.

“I remember telling my father that I was pretty unhappy and I was thinking about leaving,” she says. But her father convinced her to try one more term at Pomona. She headed back and found her place thanks to a few good friends and a course in organic chemistry. “I loved it, and I was good at it,” she says. “That had me hooked. After that semester, I was like, ‘Nope, this is working for me. I like this place.’”

Culturing a scientist in the lab

The first, intoxicating taste of lab work that Doudna had at Pomona was working as a dishwasher in a genetics lab. “I felt grateful, and I thought, ‘Maybe if I do a careful job washing dishes, someday they’ll actually let me hold a pipette,’” she says. Doudna then worked her way around the research labs on campus before landing a summer job in Sharon Panasenko’s biochemistry lab.

On the first day in the lab, Doudna was tasked with figuring out how to grow soil bacteria on large baking sheets instead of in agar. Doudna today can still recount the steps she took: “I poured the plate, and I autoclaved it so it would be sterile, and then I plated the cells and rolled them out on the plate, covered it with a seal that would protect the plate, put it in the incubator overnight, and went home. I couldn’t wait to get to the lab the next morning,” she says.

When Doudna returned and peeled back the cover, she could see her success. “The cells that I had spread out evenly were now forming these little structures. And I ran down the hall to my professor’s office, and I said, ‘I did it!’”

Doudna’s work in Panasenko’s biochemistry lab lasted only the one summer, but it made quite the impression. “I loved the science so much. I loved working in the lab. So I was always asking myself, ‘How do I do more?’”

She managed to land herself at Harvard University for graduate school, and there Doudna matured from an excited student into a serious scientist. Yet she still maintained the joy she had for discovery. Doudna, an early riser, was often the first to arrive, turning the lights on in the morning in the lab of her graduate adviser, Jack W. Szostak, who would later be awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on telomeres.

But Doudna was working on something else; she was trying to understand the capabilities of ribozymes—strands of RNA that have the catalytic abilities of enzymes.

Specifically, Doudna was studying a ribozyme in the ciliated protozoa Tetrahymena thermophila that could splice itself out of a preribosomal RNA transcript. Doudna, with the help of her adviser and his lab, was able to figure out that this RNA’s splicing capabilities were due to the RNA’s secondary structure, not its sequence.

“I remember my first paper got rejected. We sent it to Cell,” she says. “I was really crushed . . . . I think I’d spent a couple years on the project at that point.”

Doudna’s first paper was eventually published in 1989 (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., DOI: 10.1073/pnas.86.19.7402). And while she remembers that moment as a great success, in the time between that rejection and publication, Doudna was working on something that would make an even greater impact: showing that the Tetrahymena ribozyme could make a fully complementary product strand, which suggested that RNA could self-replicate and hinted at what could have transpired during the origins of life (Nature 1989, DOI: 10.1038/339519a0).

Fortunate findings and collaborations

For her postdoc, Doudna moved from Harvard to the University of Colorado Boulder, to the lab of Thomas Cech, who first discovered the Tetrahymena ribozyme and had just received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the catalytic properties of RNA. Here, Doudna began to work on determining the crystal structure of the Tetrahymena ribozyme with help from MS student Jamie H. Cate.

The process of crystallizing RNA was a real struggle until one day, a random temperature spike in the crystallization room led to a “fairly big, fairly beautiful crystal,” Doudna says. That fortuitous moment led to a reproducible process for RNA crystallization and eventually a collaboration with Yale University professors Joan and Thomas Steitz, who were on sabbatical at Boulder that year (Science 1996, DOI: 10.1126/science.273.5282.1678).

Thomas Steitz was an expert in cryogenic electron microscopy. He invited Doudna to Yale to try out the technique on her ribozyme samples to supplement her crystallography, and it worked beautifully. “It was one of those magical moments; they don’t happen very often,” she says.

Soon after, Cate moved to Yale to do his PhD, and the Steitzes helped convince Doudna to take a faculty position there. At Yale, the collaborators continued their work on the structural determination of the ribozyme, and Doudna would make a name for herself in the world of RNA structural biology. Meanwhile, Thomas Steitz was also working to help uncover the structure of the ribosome. He was later awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his efforts.

When Cate went to the University of California, Santa Cruz, for a postdoc, the pair “realized that we really kind of enjoyed hanging out with each other,” Doudna recalls. The couple began a long-distance relationship until Cate got a faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999, after which they started splitting time between the greater Boston area and New Haven, Connecticut. They married the next year, and eventually both moved to the University of California, Berkeley.

The beginning of the CRISPR craze

Berkeley is where Doudna’s story becomes one of legend. In 2006, Berkeley microbiologist Jill Banfield introduced Doudna to these weird genomic features in bacteria called clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats, also known as CRISPR. Eventually, Doudna began working to uncover the function of the CRISPR-associated, or Cas, proteins with postdocs Blake Wiedenheft, Sam Sternberg, and Martin Jínek; French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier, whom she would later share the Nobel Prize with; and a select few other lab members and researchers around the globe who had formed a small CRISPR community.

In 2012, the team showed that one protein, Cas9, acted as a pair of molecular scissors that, when paired with two specialized RNA strands, CRISPR RNA (crRNA) and trans-activating crRNA (tracrRNA), could cut DNA at targeted genomic locations (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1225829). The researchers also showed that those two RNAs could be combined into an easy-to-design single-guide RNA; “that experiment ended up in supplemental figure 15” of the paper, Doudna says. The single-guide RNA is now recognized as one of the CRISPR gene-editing system’s defining features.

The 2012 paper started a race to demonstrate that CRISPR gene editing could be used in mammalian cells—a system Doudna had no experience in. But a new graduate student rotating through Doudna’s lab, Alexandra East, just so happened to have experience doing human-tissue-culture work at the Broad Institute. “It’s so interesting to me how science actually works. There’s serendipity to it. You don’t necessarily have to have the most highly trained expert. You just have to have somebody that knows how to do a certain technique,” Doudna says.

The team quickly moved to show that CRISPR could edit DNA in human cells, and while the Doudna lab was successful, the researchers were beat to the punch by two other teams working to do the same thing—one led by George Church at Harvard University, and the other led by Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute.

The first Doudna knew of the other teams’ success was a call from Church, who had known her since she was a graduate student, letting her know that his paper showing CRISPR editing in human cells was soon to be published. “I knew I had, like, 3 days to write this paper,” Doudna says.

“I never pulled my first all-nighter until I was writing my first NIH [National Institutes of Health] grant at Yale,” Doudna says. But at a California writing retreat, Doudna stayed up until the small hours of the morning. She spent that time writing under the covers of her bed, trying to keep the chill desert air at bay as the heat was broken at the house, desperately trying to finish her paper on human genome editing with CRISPR. Doudna finished, and the paper was submitted, quickly accepted, and published online the same month as Church’s paper on human genome editing using Cas9 and Zhang’s paper demonstrating CRISPR editing in eukaryotic cells (eLife 2013, DOI: 10.7554/elife.00471; Science 2013, DOI: 10.1126/science.1232033 and 10.1126/science.1231143).

Soon after, a CRISPR patent war over the intellectual rights to the CRISPR human-gene-editing technology began between Berkeley, the University of Vienna, where Charpentier worked, and the Broad Institute. That patent fight is still ongoing (PDF) all these years later.

A new era for gene editing

The following years, seeing CRISPR’s development into a powerful gene-editing tool and potential therapeutic, were not entirely collegiate. Still, Doudna began to commercialize CRISPR and launch a few companies, including Caribou Biosciences, Intellia Therapeutics, and Mammoth Biosciences, among others.

Then in 2019, Victoria Gray was treated with a preclinical version of Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ Casgevy and became the first person to have their genome edited with CRISPR, successfully curing her of the sickle-cell genetic disease. Doudna says that one of the most incredible moments in her career was meeting Gray.

The next year, Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on CRISPR.

For all the good CRISPR can do, the technology also raises a slew of ethical questions about the limits of its use. Famously, in 2018 He Jiankui edited human embryos to enhance HIV resistance, and they were implanted in a woman in China, who gave birth to genetically edited twin girls. That event rocked the scientific community, and Doudna was one of the scientists trying to help the world process the ethical ramifications.

“I’ve sort of been thrust into it,” she says of being a part of these difficult conversations. “And I think it’s incredibly important, especially when we have technologies like CRISPR that are, on the one hand, very powerful and on the other hand, come along with significant risk.”

Since He’s controversial experiment, science has gotten only more politicized, and Doudna says scientists should no longer be content to believe they can stay out of the political conversation. “That’s the old world, but I think we’re not in that world anymore,” she says. “I think scientists have to speak out as much as we can.”

Passing joy on to the next generation

Back in Berkeley, at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), a Doudna-founded hub connecting CRISPR and genomics with the biotech industry to solve real-world problems, Doudna has clearly found a new home that brings her as much joy as her childhood home in Hawaii.

When C&EN visited the IGI on a sunny Thursday afternoon in the early days of spring, around 50 people filtered into a first-floor auditorium for the Doudna group meeting, with more joining via video conference. The day’s speaker—a longtime postdoc of Doudna’s working at the Gladstone Institutes, roughly 15 miles (24 km) away in downtown San Francisco—stood at the front and introduced himself to the audience, specifically calling out to group members he hadn’t yet met.

Doudna sat in the front row, among the trainees and staff taking notes and eating. In hushed tones, some in the audience excitedly told each other about the day’s experiments. One might expect that working in a Nobel laureate’s lab would come with intense pressure, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

“I think a lot of our conversations have revolved around, like, just how do we just keep the fun going?” says Kenneth Loi, a recent undergrad at Berkeley who now works as a technician in the Doudna lab.

“A lot of the work that we do is joyful,” Doudna says. Not all of it, she admits, “but a lot.”

The fun doesn’t come from a party atmosphere or lackadaisical mindset, though clearly the lab gets along socially as well as professionally. “By cultivating people’s interests, I think you encourage a fun environment,” says Owen Tuck, a fifth-year PhD student in Doudna’s lab. “I think that’s a strategic decision of Jennifer’s; she collects all these people who have a broad range of interests and then guides their direction in the lab.”

While Doudna’s trainees say that Doudna is very generous with the time she dedicates to them, the media-shy Kaihong Zhou, Doudna’s lab manager since her first faculty job at Yale, is the one who runs the show on a day-to-day basis. “She’s amazing,” Tuck says of Zhou. “Not only amazing as a manager, facilitator, and task master, but also she was a huge scientific force, especially early on.”

When the Nobel Prizes were awarded in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic meant that Doudna had a small, socially distanced event in her backyard to celebrate. But 2 years later, when the world reopened and the Nobel Foundation had an official ceremony in Stockholm, Doudna brought Zhou with her to celebrate.

“Yeah, I think they’re paired, like they said that they would retire together,” Tuck says.

After the IGI group meeting, Doudna sat with C&EN with a smile, and quite a bit of patience, to recount the story of her life, from the very beginning to the present day. And while Doudna clearly sits at the center of the story of CRISPR and gene editing, she says she doesn’t need to be at the forefront of the field anymore.

New technologies based on CRISPR have been developed by Doudna’s peers for even more specialized purposes, such as David Liu’s base editing and prime editing and Patrick Hsu’s bridge editing.

Now, Doudna plans to slow down just a little and focus her attention where she thinks she can have the most impact—mentoring the next generation. “At the moment, I’m really excited about continuing to build the Innovative Genomics Institute,” she says.

In the near term, Doudna anticipates reducing the size of her lab so she can spend more time with her trainees, preparing them for a future where they can become a force for positive change. “I’d like to see a world where their only limitation is their ideas,” she says. And perhaps, they’ll have fun doing it.