Back in the real world, Lander calls CRISPR “the most surprising discovery, and maybe most consequential discovery, in this century so far.” He’s a little biased, it must be said: Zhang is one of the star faculty at the Broad Institute, Zhang led one of the first demonstrations of CRISPR gene editing in human cells, and has co-founded five companies in five years. Prestige, patents, and prizes are all at stake. Beyond that, a sense of scientific immortality perhaps—the chance to be remembered as the inventor of one of the great discoveries in science and medicine, to be catapulted into the pantheon of science—Pasteur, Einstein, Fleming, Crick, Franklin, Hawking.
But most of the international recognition and early awards for the discovery of CRISPR belong to a pair of female scientists who collaborated to produce what one scientist called an “immortal” paper that appeared in June 2012. Like a short-lived supergroup, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna teamed up to program a bacterial enzyme to target and cut any DNA sequence according to the investigators’ whim, laying the groundwork for a game changing, genome editing tool with boundless applications.
According to the doyen of DNA, Jim Watson, what Doudna and Charpentier did was “the biggest advance in science since the discovery of the double helix.” But it’s important to use it so that it’s equitable. “If it’s only used to solve the problems and desires of the top 10 percent, that will be horrible,” Watson warned. “We have evolved more and more in the past few decades into an inequitable society, and this would make it much worse.”5
In a profile of the dynamic duo for the Time 100, Mary-Claire King called their work “a tour de force of elegant deduction and experiment” that affords scientists “the power to remove or add genetic material at will.” King christened CRISPR “a true breakthrough, the implications of which we are just beginning to imagine.”6
Over the past few years, I’ve watched the impact of CRISPR spread like wildfire around the world, commanding attention not only from scientists and the media but also from royalty, politicians, and even the Pope.
Every two years, the Norwegian capital hosts the Kavli Prize, awarded by the nonprofit foundation set up by the late Fred Kavli, a Norwegian inventor who made a small fortune in Southern California. In collaboration with the Norwegian Academy of Sciences, the Kavli Foundation bestows three $1-million awards for spectacular science that is big (astrophysics), small (nanoscience), and complex (neuroscience). The awards may not quite match the luster of the Nobel prize or the purse of Silicon Valley’s Breakthrough Prize, but they are among the most coveted in science.
In September 2018, the Kavli Foundation awarded the nanoscience prize to a trio of CRISPR pioneers—Charpentier and Doudna were joined by Lithuanian molecular biologist Virginijus Šikšnys. The first two came as no surprise. The inclusion of the Lithuanian was belated recognition of his own pioneering work, despite being scooped by the Charpentier-Doudna team in the summer of 2012. My efforts to peek into the jury deliberations were swatted away with amusement by a Kavli program officer, who said I’d have to wait fifty years for the jury notes to be unsealed.
The streets of Oslo are adorned with banners marking the Kavli celebrations. En route to the University of Oslo campus, I ask my Uber driver if he’s heard of the Kavli Prize. He starts to shake his head, but then he remembers: “Oh wait, I read about one of them—he’s from my country! He’s our man! Tell him to book a ride with Raymondias.” Against the odds, I’m being chauffeured by the one Oslo Uber driver who has heard of Virgis Šikšnys.
That evening, the laureates mingle with guests at a reception held in the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. A young attaché to the American Embassy asks me for an introduction to Doudna, a late arrival with her husband, fellow Berkeley professor Jamie Cate, and their teenage son Andrew. “How do you pronounce her name? Is it Dood-na?” (It’s not.) Doudna smiles graciously but looks like she needs some sleep. In the buffet line I’m cornered by a Norwegian philosophy professor, who says I should expect plenty of speeches at the formal banquet the following evening. He explains with a little Scandinavian joke. “A Dane, a Swede and a Norwegian find themselves on death row. Each is given one last request. The Dane says, ‘I want a feast, a roast pork dinner with all the trimmings.’ The Norwegian says, ‘I want to give a long speech.’ As for the Swede, he begs to be shot before the Norwegian’s speech.” (Perhaps you had to be there.)
The next day, hundreds of guests file into the Norwegian City Theater for the official prize ceremony. The audience chatter halts abruptly as King Harald V enters the stage. Part Oscars, part Eurovision Song Contest, we’re treated to a gloriously eclectic selection of musical entertainment. The show opens with Mathias Rugsveen, a fifteen-year-old “sorcerer of the accordion,” who crushes a selection from The Barber of Seville. Before the neuroscience prize, Norway’s answer to Adele belts out a version of “Crazy.” At one point, cohost Alan Alda loses his place on the teleprompter but recovers effortlessly: “Hold on, my ad lib is here somewhere!” Finally, it is time for King Harald to present the nanoscience prize to Charpentier, Doudna, and Šikšnys. Only at the ceremony’s conclusion, as Doudna beckons family and friends to join her on stage, do the laureates visibly relax and hug each other.
Later that evening, the laureates make a grand entrance down a long marble staircase in the magnificent Oslo City Hall to the forty-nine bells of the carillon. King Harald joins the laureates at the VIP table. We feast on a menu of salmon and halibut sashimi followed by filet of deer. I’m reliably informed by the president of the Norwegian Student Union that deer has a completely different taste than reindeer, which he hunted as a boy.
As promised, there are speeches—no fewer than six. The keynote is Marcia McNutt, an ocean scientist and president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She approves that Kavli recognized more female scientists than men. “For every little girl who dreams of rising to the pinnacle of scientific achievement, your future awaits.”III The director general for research for the European Commission, Jean-Eric Paquet, praises the winners’ curiosity, tenacity, and willingness to take risks. “Fortune favors the bold,” he says, citing another famous risk-taker, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. Before his first expedition to Antarctica, Shackleton ran a newspaper ad: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages. Bitter cold. Long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful.”
As it was for Shackleton, instant success was rare for the Kavli laureates. “Tonight, we see only the result, the exceptional achievement,” Paquet remarks. “What we don’t see tonight are the years of hard work, the setbacks, the failures, and the times when they each had to pick themselves up and carry on. In the end, these men and women achieved so much not because they avoided the risk but because they allowed their curiosity to guide them in spite of it—just as Shackleton did.”7