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Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie[a] (Polish: [ˈmarja salɔˈmɛa skwɔˈdɔfska kiˈri] ⓘ; née Skłodowska; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934)[1], better known as Marie Curie (/ˈkjʊəri/ KURE-ee;[2] French: [maʁi kyʁi] ⓘ), was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie "for their joint researches on the radioactivity phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel".[3] She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "[for] the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element".[4]

She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different scientific fields. Marie and Pierre were the first married couple to win the Nobel Prize and launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.[5]

She was born in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire. She studied at Warsaw's clandestine Flying University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her elder sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work. In 1895, she married Pierre Curie, with whom she conducted pioneering research on radioactivity—a term she coined.[6][7] In 1906, Pierre died in a Paris street accident.

Under her direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms by the use of radioactive isotopes. She founded the Curie Institute in Paris in 1920, and the Curie Institute in Warsaw in 1932; both remain major medical research centres. During World War I, she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals.

While a French citizen, Marie Skłodowska Curie, who used both surnames,[8][9] never lost her sense of Polish identity. She taught her daughters the Polish language and took them on visits to Poland.[10] She named the first chemical element she and Pierre discovered polonium, after her native country.[b]

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Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, author and social theorist. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.[3] Davis was a longtime member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and a founding member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). She has been active in movements such as the Occupy movement and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama; she studied at Brandeis University and the University of Frankfurt. She also studied at the University of California, San Diego, before moving to East Germany, where she completed some studies for a doctorate at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. After returning to the United States, she joined the CPUSA and became involved in the second-wave feminist movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War.

In 1969, she was hired as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). UCLA's governing Board of Regents soon fired her due to her membership in the CPUSA. After a court ruled the firing illegal, the university fired her for the use of inflammatory language. In 1970, guns belonging to Davis were used in an armed takeover of a courtroom in Marin County, California, in which four people were killed. Prosecuted for three capital felonies—including conspiracy to murder—she was held in jail for more than a year before being acquitted of all charges in 1972.

During the 1980s, Davis was twice the Communist Party's candidate for the Vice President of the United States. In 1997, she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison–industrial complex. In 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she broke away from the CPUSA to help establish the CCDS. That same year, she joined the feminist studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she became department director before retiring in 2008.

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Lydia Villa-Komaroff (born August 7, 1947) is a molecular and cellular biologist who has been an academic laboratory scientist, a university administrator, and a business woman. She was the third[1] Mexican-American woman in the United States to receive a doctorate degree in the sciences (1975) and is a co-founding member of The Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS).[2] Her most notable discovery was in 1978 during her post-doctoral research, when she was part of a team that discovered how bacterial cells could be used to generate insulin.[3]

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Lise Meitner (/ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnər/ LEE-zə MYTE-nər, German: [ˈliːzə ˈmaɪtnɐ] ⓘ; born Elise Meitner, 7 November 1878 – 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission.[1] While working on radioactivity at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Chemistry in Berlin, she discovered the radioactive isotope protactinium-231 in 1917. In 1938, Meitner and her nephew, the physicist Otto Robert Frisch, discovered nuclear fission. She was praised by Albert Einstein as the "German Marie Curie".[2]

Completing her doctoral research in 1905, Meitner became the second woman from the University of Vienna to earn a doctorate in physics. She spent most of her scientific career in Berlin, Germany, where she was a physics professor and a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; she was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. She lost these positions in the 1930s because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany, and in 1938 she fled to Sweden, where she lived for many years, ultimately becoming a Swedish citizen.

In mid-1938, Meitner with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute found that bombarding thorium with neutrons produced different isotopes. Hahn and Strassmann later in the year showed that isotopes of barium could be formed by bombardment of uranium. In late December, Meitner and Frisch worked out the physics of such a splitting process. In their report in February issue of Nature in 1939, they gave it the name "fission". This principle led to the development of the first atomic bomb during World War II, and subsequently other nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors.

Meitner did not share the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission, which was awarded exclusively to her long-time collaborator Otto Hahn. Several scientists and journalists have called her exclusion "unjust". According to the Nobel Prize archive, she was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 30 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1967. Despite not having been awarded the Nobel Prize, Meitner was invited to attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1962. She received many other honours, including the naming of chemical element 109 meitnerium in 1997 after her death.

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Maria Sibylla Merian Facts
Maria Sibylla Merian was a Naturalist, an Entomologist and a Botanical Illustrator and is rated as being one of the greatest ever botanical artists.​ She is best known for her illustrations of plants and insects made as a result of her trips to the tropical country of Surinam on the north eastern cost of South America. Maria Sibylla Merian was a Swiss naturalist and artist living and working in the seventeenth century. She excelled in both endeavors. One of her principal claims to fame is that she is one of the first naturalists to have studied insects. She recorded and illustrated the life cycles of 186 insect species. Her evidence documented the nature of metamorphosis and contradicted contemporary ideas about how insects developed. She also discovered unknown animals and insects in the interior of Surinam. Her classification of butterflies and moths is still used today. She undertook scientific expeditions at a time when these were unusual and normally undertaken by men only.

Merian's Life
She was born on April 2, 1647 and lived in Frankfurt, Germany to a family of Swiss heritage. Her father was the Swiss engraver and publisher Matthäus Merian who was an Elder at the time of her birth, but dies in 1650.  Her mother remarried in 1651 to Jacob Marrel. Her stepfather is a renowned flower and still life painter and encourages her to paint.
In 1660 at age thirteen, she started to collect silk worms and began to raise them. Then she begins to paint images of insects and plants from specimens that she has captured. Throughout her life, she kept specimens and studied their life cycles.

"I spent my time investigating insects. At the beginning, I started with silk worms in my home town of Frankfurt. I realized that other caterpillars produced beautiful butterflies or moths, and that silkworms did the same. This led me to collect all the caterpillars I could find in order to see how they changed."

She marries (name not given) in 1665. Shortly afterwards she has her first child. She decided to  continue to paint and also taught painting. Most of her specimens came from gardens. She publishes her first collection of engravings, Neues Blumenbuch. A book of flowers in 1675. Maria p ublishes her second collection of engravings in 1677, called: Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung.  (The Caterpillar, Marvelous Transformation and Strange Floral Food). In this set of engravings she demonstrated the life cycle of the butterfly and how it transforms from a caterpillar to a butterfly. In 1680 she published her third collection of engravings.  Merian leaves her husband in 1685, and moves to a religious commune. While at the commune, she practiced celibacy with her mother and two daughters -  Johanna Helen and Dorothea Maria. ​She lived in a home owned by Cornelis van Sommelsdijk, the governor of Surinam. This enabled her to begin her studies of the tropical flora and fauna of Surinam and South America. In 1690 Her mother dies, and she moves to Amsterdam. Her daughter subsequently marries and moves to Surinam. (A Dutch colony. Surinam was colonized by the Dutch in the 17th century and known as Dutch Guiana until 1954.) The city of Amsterdam sponsors Merian in 1699 to go on a trip to Surinam with her daughter. She travels around the area now known as French, Dutch and British Guianas for two years. Her work involves sketching the plant life, animals and insects. Merian returns to Amsterdam in 1701 due to malaria. She sells specimens that she has collected and begins her preparations to produce and publish a collection of engravings about life in Surinam. Between 1701 and 1705 she makes 60 copperplate engravings to illustrate the stages of insect development, arranged around the cultivated and wild plants she had encountered on her travels. Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, her illustrated book about the Insects of Surinam is published in Dutch and Latin. With its detailed text and imagery, the Metamorphosis is the first work on the natural history of Surinam. In 1715, Merian suffers a stroke after which she is partially paralyzed, and subsequently becomes a pauper (a person who doesn't have a lot of money), as she is unable to work. January 13, 1717, she dies in Amsterdam. A collection of her work, Erucarum Ortus Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis, is published after her death.
After Merian's death, her artwork has become extremely popular and is a part of many prestigious collections, including the Royal Collection.

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Born: April 16, 1921
Died: October 28, 2003

Marie Maynard Daly was an American biochemist. She was the first African-American woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. Daly's early research included studies of the effects of cholesterol on the mechanics of the heart, the effects of sugars and other nutrients on the health of arteries, and the breakdown of the circulatory system as a result of advanced age or hypertension

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Geraldyn M. Cobb (March 5, 1931 – March 18, 2019), commonly known as Jerrie Cobb, was an American aviator. She was also part of the Mercury 13, a group of women who underwent physiological screening tests at the same time as the original Mercury Seven astronauts. She was the first to complete each of the tests.

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Biography

Geraldyn M. Cobb was born March 5, 1931, in Norman, Oklahoma, the second daughter of Lt. Col. William "Harvey" Cobb and Helena Stone Cobb. At the age of six Jerrie discovered the great outdoors and fell in love with the sheer expanse and wonder of the vast wide-open sky.

During World War II the family was stationed at Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, Texas, where 12-year-old Jerrie experienced the joy of flying for the first time in her father's 1936 Waco. Soaring above the earth gave the shy girl a confidence she didn't feel on the ground.

After the war Jerrie's family moved to Oklahoma City. At age 16, Jerrie earned her private pilot's license. Her only thoughts were to buy a plane so she could earn a living as a pilot. After graduation, playing professional women's softball provided money for flying lessons. By age 18 she not only had earned her commercial pilot's license, but was a certified ground instructor with ratings in civil air regulations, navigation, meteorology, airframe, and engines.

Jerrie spent a year at Oklahoma College for Women, but found more joy by working at Chickasha Municipal Airport doing general maintenance and crop dusting work. Playing pro softball again afforded Jerrie the opportunity to purchase a surplused Fairchild PT-23 that she named "Par-a-dice Lost." The next few years found Jerrie working any job that would allow her to fly - crop dusting, pipeline patrol, or flight instructing.

She traveled to Florida in pursuit of a job as a DC-3 co-pilot, but was turned down once they discovered Jerrie wasn't a man. With no money to return home, she found work at an aircraft maintenance shop at Miami International Airport - as a typist and file clerk.

It was here that she met Jack Ford, president of Fleetway Incorporated, an international aircraft ferry service. He needed a pilot to help him deliver two AT-6's to Peru. Jerrie, all of 21, eagerly volunteered. He reluctantly agreed to give her a try, giving her the briefest of instruction. When Jack's plane was grounded in Colombia, Jerrie continued on alone, successfully, to Peru.

Jerrie spent the next three years delivering all types of aircraft worldwide, from trainers to surplus flying boats to B-17 bombers. In 1955 she left Fleetway, returning to Oklahoma City.

Over the next several years Jerrie set several aviation records for speed, distance, and altitude in a twin engine Aero Commander, earning her a job with the type's manufacturer as both a pilot and a manager. Then, in September 1959, Jerrie was presented with a once in a lifetime opportunity.

The 28-year-old was selected to be among thirteen women subjected to the Mercury astronaut selection process. Committed to earning her way into space, she successfully completed all three phases of the rigorous program.

However, three years of political wrangling and one contentious Congressional hearing later, NASA closed the door on sending Jerrie or any other of the "Mercury 13," into space as this group of women had become known to the public. It would be another 20 years before the first American woman would orbit earth and 32 years before a woman would command a space mission.

Spurned by NASA, Jerrie thought long and hard about how her piloting abilities might be better used back on earth. Melding a deep spirituality with her love of flight, in 1963 Jerrie felt called to become a missionary pilot serving the indigenous people of the Amazon jungle.

Typically flying solo in her Aero Commander, she pioneered new air routes across the hazardous Andes Mountains and Amazon rain forests, using self-drawn maps that guided her over uncharted territory larger than the United States. For the next 48 years Jerrie enabled the deliveries of medicine, food, seeds, clothing and other necessities to the primitive inhabitants of isolated regions, creating deep bonds of mutual understanding, admiration and friendship.

In 1973, President Nixon awarded Jerrie the Harmon Trophy, naming her "the top woman pilot in the world." In 1981 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her humanitarian work in South America.

With well over 10,000 hours of flight time, Jerrie more than fulfilled her personal obligation in the sky. As a record-setting and humanitarian pilot, she inspired many others on earth. This includes helping pave the way for all American women astronauts.

Jerrie Cobb is truly a trailblazing aviation pioneer, and tonight we proudly welcome her into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

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Cobb, Geraldyn "Jerrie" M. : National Aviation Hall of Fame

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Geraldyn M. Cobb was born March 5, 1931, in Norman, Oklahoma, the second daughter of Lt. Col. William "Harvey" Cobb and Helena Stone Cobb. At the age of six Jerrie discovered the great outdoors and fell in love with the sheer expanse and wonder of the vast wide-open sky.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wollstonecraft

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Wollstonecraft

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Wollstonecraft

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Born: May 31, 1912, Liuhe, Taicang, Suzhou, China
Died: February 16, 1997, New York, NY

Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion.

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Jane Goodall was the first person to observe chimpanzees creating and using tools—a trait that, at that time, was thought to be distinctly human. This discovery changed the way that we understand both animals and ourselves.

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Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992) was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There she started her career as the leader in the development of maize cytogenetics, the focus of her research for the rest of her life. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. She developed the technique for visualizing Maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas. One of those ideas was the notion of genetic recombination by crossing-over during meiosis—a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. She produced the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome to physical traits. She demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized as among the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships, and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.

During the 1940s and 1950s, McClintock discovered transposition and used it to demonstrate that genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on and off. She developed theories to explain the suppression and expression of genetic information from one generation of maize plants to the next. Due to skepticism of her research and its implications, she stopped publishing her data in 1953.

Later, she made an extensive study of the cytogenetics and ethnobotany of maize races from South America. McClintock's research became well understood in the 1960s and 1970s, as other scientists confirmed the mechanisms of genetic change and protein expression that she had demonstrated in her maize research in the 1940s and 1950s. Awards and recognition for her contributions to the field followed, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to her in 1983 for the discovery of genetic transposition; as of 2022, she remains the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.[2]

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent a lifetime flourishing in the face of adversity before being appointed a Supreme Court justice, where she successfully fought against gender discrimination and unified the liberal block of the court. She was born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. Her father was a furrier in the height of the Great Depression, and her mother worked in a garment factory. Ginsburg’s mother instilled a love of education in Ginsburg through her dedication to her brother; foregoing her own education to finance her brother’s college expenses. Her mother heavily influenced her early life and watched Ginsburg excel at James Madison High School, but was diagnosed with cancer and died the day before Ginsburg’s high school graduation. Ginsburg’s success in academia continued throughout her years at Cornell University, where she graduated at the top of her class in 1954. That same year, Ruth Bader became Ruth Bader Ginsburg after marrying her husband Martin. After graduation, she put her education on hold to start a family. She had her first child in 1955, shortly after her husband was drafted for two years of military service. Upon her husband’s return from his service, Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law.

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Barbara McClintock

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She may look like another pretty face, but Hedy Lamarr is much more than that. During World War 2, Hedy invented an early version of frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication, originally intended for torpedo guidance. The same technology that is used for bluetooth today! Her screen presence made her look like any other American movie star to the unsuspecting Axis Powers. So, the next time you use Bluetooth, think of the powerful woman behind the technology.

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Ritu Kirdhal is an Indian scientist working with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), she was a Deputy Operations Director to India's Mars Orbital Mission, Mangalyaan. She has been referred to as a "Rocket Woman" of India. Born and brought up in Lucknow, she is an aerospace engineer and has also worked for many other earlier ISRO projects and served as Operations Director for some of these. -submitted by Vernika R.K.

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Ruth's full name is Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She recently died September 18, 2020. She was an American Lawyer, who served as an Supreme Court Associate.
Famous Quotes- "My mother told me to be a lady. And for her that meant to be your own person, be independent. "

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Lisa Meitner is a Swedish American scientist who contribute to the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working at the

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Katherine Johnson, also known as (1939–56) Katherine Goble, (born August 26, 1918, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, U.S.—died February 24, 2020, Newport News, Virginia), American mathematician who calculated and analyzed the flight paths of many spacecraft during her more than three decades with the U.S. space program. Her work helped send astronauts to the Moon.

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English chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite. Wikipedia

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She is a researcher and an a scientific lead at the National Institute of Health. She is studying to make vaccines for COVID.~ Crystal/ Chris Britt

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She is the first Indian woman to go into space. She unfortunately died during a mission.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/chawla_kalpana.pdf
-Iniya Saravanan

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She was the first Brazilian woman to earn a doctorate in physics and the second to become a physics graduate in Brazil. She was born April 9th 1923 died 21st August 1948. Cause of death (Bronhopneumonia, Myocarditis, and heart failure). - Audrina E.

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Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, in Physics, and with her later win, in Chemistry, she became the first person to claim Nobel honors twice. Her efforts with her husband Pierre led to the discovery of polonium and radium, and she championed the development of X-rays. - Tanisha M.

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What did Marie Curie accomplish?

Why was Marie Curie important?

Marie Curie, née Maria Salomea Skłodowska, (born November 7, 1867, Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire-died July 4, 1934, near Sallanches, France), Polish-born French physicist, famous for her work on radioactivity and twice a winner of the Nobel Prize. With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. She was the sole winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she is the only woman to win the award in two different fields.
(Read Marie Curie's 1926 Britannica essay on radium.)

Early life

From childhood she was remarkable for her prodigious memory, and at the age of 16 she won a gold medal on completion of her secondary education at the Russian lycée. Because her father, a teacher of mathematics and physics, lost his savings through bad investment, she had to take work as a teacher and, at the same time, took part clandestinely in the nationalist "free university," reading in Polish to women workers. At the age of 18 she took a post as governess, where she suffered an unhappy love affair. From her earnings she was able to finance her sister Bronisława's medical studies in Paris, with the understanding that Bronisława would in turn later help her to get an education.

Move to Paris, Pierre Curie, and first Nobel Prize

In 1891 Skłodowska went to Paris and, now using the name Marie, began to follow the lectures of Paul Appell, Gabriel Lippmann, and Edmond Bouty at the Sorbonne. There she met physicists who were already well known- Jean Perrin, Charles Maurain, and Aimé Cotton. Skłodowska worked far into the night in her student-quarters garret and virtually lived on bread and butter and tea. She came first in the licence of physical sciences in 1893. She began to work in Lippmann's research laboratory and in 1894 was placed second in the licence of mathematical sciences. It was in the spring of that year that she met Pierre Curie.

Their marriage (July 25, 1895) marked the start of a partnership that was soon to achieve results of world significance, in particular the discovery of polonium (so called by Marie in honour of her native land) in the summer of 1898 and that of radium a few months later. Following Henri Becquerel's discovery (1896) of a new phenomenon (which she later called "radioactivity"), Marie Curie, looking for a subject for a thesis, decided to find out if the property discovered in uranium was to be found in other matter. She discovered that this was true for thorium at the same time as G.C. Schmidt did.

Turning her attention to minerals, she found her interest drawn to pitchblende, a mineral whose activity, superior to that of pure uranium, could be explained only by the presence in the ore of small quantities of an unknown substance of very high activity. Pierre Curie then joined her in the work that she had undertaken to resolve this problem and that led to the discovery of the new elements, polonium and radium. While Pierre Curie devoted himself chiefly to the physical study of the new radiations, Marie Curie struggled to obtain pure radium in the metallic state-achieved with the help of the chemist André-Louis Debierne, one of Pierre Curie's pupils. On the results of this research, Marie Curie received her doctorate of science in June 1903 and, with Pierre, was awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society. Also in 1903 they shared with Becquerel the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity.

The birth of her two daughters, Irène and Ève, in 1897 and 1904, did not interrupt Marie's intensive scientific work. She was appointed lecturer in physics at the École Normale Supérieure for girls in Sèvres (1900) and introduced there a method of teaching based on experimental demonstrations. In December 1904 she was appointed chief assistant in the laboratory directed by Pierre Curie.

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Marie Curie | Biography, Nobel Prize, Accomplishments, & Facts

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Marie Curie, Polish-born French physicist, famous for her work on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she is the only woman to win the award in two different fields (Physics, 1903; Chemistry, 1911). Learn more about Marie Curie in this article.

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American Biochemist
Marie Maynard Daly was the first African-American women to earn her PhD in chemistry. - Armani H.

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Overcoming the dual hurdles of racial and gender bias, Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003) conducted important studies on cholesterol, sugars, and proteins. In addition to her research, she was committed to developing programs to increase the enrollment of minority students in medical school and graduate science programs.

Daly's early research included studies of the effects of cholesterol on the mechanics of the heart, the effects of sugars and other nutrients on the health of arteries, and the breakdown of the circulatory system as a result of advanced age or hypertension. Later she studied how proteins are produced and organized in the cell.

A Budding Interest in Science

Born in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, New York, Daly was an avid reader and was fascinated by Paul De Kruif's popular book The Microbe Hunters. She was further inspired by her father's love of science. Unfortunately, he had been forced by economic circumstances to drop out of Cornell University, where he had been pursuing a bachelor's degree in chemistry.

Daly was educated at Hunter College High School, an all-female institution, where her ambition to become a chemist was supported and encouraged. She enrolled in Queens College in Flushing, New York, as a commuting student, and graduated magna cum laude in 1942 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry. The college offered her a fellowship to pursue graduate studies in chemistry at New York University while working part-time as a laboratory assistant at Queens College. In just one year she completed her master's degree.

A PhD from Columbia

Daly enrolled in the doctoral program at Columbia University after working for a year tutoring chemistry students at Queens College. She also obtained funding from the university to help in her full-time study of chemistry. Under the direction of Mary L. Caldwell, who was known for her work on the important digestive enzyme amylase, Daly researched how compounds produced in the body affect and participate in digestion. The title of her dissertation was "A Study of the Products Formed by the Action of Pancreatic Amylase on Corn Starch." She was awarded her doctoral degree in 1947, only three years after enrolling in the program, and was the first African American woman to obtain a PhD in chemistry in the United States.

Career in Research and Education

After completing her doctoral degree Daly taught for two years at Howard University in Washington, DC. On receiving a grant from the American Cancer Society to support her postdoctoral research, she joined Alfred E. Mirsky, a pioneer in molecular biology, at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where for seven years she worked on the composition and metabolism of components of the cell nucleus, among other studies. Then Daly took a new position teaching biochemistry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. In 1960 she became a professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where she remained until her retirement in 1986.

In addition to her research Daly was committed to developing programs to increase the enrollment of minority students in medical school and graduate science programs. In 1988 she established a scholarship fund for African American science students at Queens College in honor of her father.
The information contained in this biography was last updated on November 9, 2018.

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Overcoming the dual hurdles of racial and gender bias, Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003) conducted important studies on cholesterol, sugars, and proteins.

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She was a British crystallographer who developed several X-ray techniques for the study of crystal structure. - Maya K.

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When President Donald Trump paid a visit to the National Institutes of Health last March, the leads at the vaccine research center explained their life-saving mission. The key to that mission was a 34-year-old doctor named Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett.

"I was just there telling the task force about the work that we've been doing," Corbett told "CBS This Morning: Saturday" co-host Michelle Miller.

Two weeks after the visit, Corbett's team began the first stage of clinical trials. She said they took a lot of the knowledge they have gained in the last six years and applied it to a vaccine platform in collaboration with Moderna. The vaccine rolled out 10 months later.

"The vaccine teaches the body how to fend off a virus, because it teaches the body how to look for the virus by basically just showing the body the spike protein of the virus" she explained. "The body then says 'Oh, we've seen this protein before. Let's go fight against it.' That's how it works."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, credited Corbett during a webinar for her work.

"The vaccine you are going to be taking was developed by an African American woman and that is just a fact," Fauci said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 6.5 million Americans have received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. That number is expected to grow daily, though it is well behind what public health experts were hoping to see.

Corbett's interest in science started from an early age, but she never knew the difference she would make.

"To be honest, I didn't realize the level of impact that my visibility might have... I do my work because I love my work," Corbett said.

One opportunity in her life made a key difference. She attended the University of Maryland, Baltimore, as a Meyerhoff Scholar, an aggressive program that mentors minorities and women in science. Graduates of the program include Surgeon General Jerome Adams.

Dr. Freeman Hrabowski has been president at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, for nearly 30 years. He said Corbett had a strong science background but the way she was able to talk to people separated her from the rest.

"She was definitely going to make it in life," Hrabowski said. "We need more scientists who can connect to people. She could do that when she was 17, easily... What we do at UMBC is to support students of color, Black, but also students in general, to make sure they make it in science."

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 18% of all students graduate with a STEM degree, among 2% are black - something Hrabowski believes needs to change.

"It's important for people to see people looking like them, like themselves, who can be involved. If it's about women, or if it's about Blacks because it shows that you've got people who understand what you've gone through."

Dr. Barney Graham and Corbett have worked together for over 15 years. Graham is not only her mentor. He's also Corbett's boss as deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center.

"When you recognize somebody has special qualities, you need to do things that can keep those other things out of the way and avoid some of the dismissiveness that often happens not only to minority people but to women," Graham said.

Historically that bias strikes not just professionals in the field but those they serve. In 1931, scientists conducted the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, a study by the Public Health Service and Tuskegee Institute. It examined the progression of syphilis by letting infected Black men go untreated, with no regard to the suffering it caused.

Another example often cited is the removal of special cells of Henretta Lacks, a Baltimore, Maryland, cancer patient. In 1951, a research team at Johns Hopkins University removed Lacks' cells without her permission and used them in medical research worth billions of dollars. Lacks died of cancer and her family was never compensated.

"There are many other examples of supposedly objective scientists who were caring about everyone, who valued people of color less... It's a painful truth," Hrabowski said.

Corbett's understanding of the socio-cultural issues and her knowledge of science has made her an influential person in the scientific community.

In a time where vaccine skepticism is high among African Americans, Corbett hopes Black people will put faith in the vaccine and faith in the scientists working behind the scenes to bring it to the American people.

"Number one is that I get it. And then number two is to really take advantage of the level of transparency that we are attempting... even I haven't even seen before, such as FDA hearings and briefings being broadcast online, and data coming out almost instantly," she said.

As for Dr. Hrabowski, he believes Corbett deserves all the visibility she can get.

"She cannot be a hidden figure," he said. "She needs to be in textbooks. Little girls need to see her - of all races. This is what's possible."

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Meet the Black female scientist at the forefront of COVID-19 vaccine development

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When President Donald Trump paid a visit to the National Institutes of Health last March, the leads at the vaccine research center explained their life-saving mission. The key to that mission was a 34-year-old doctor named Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett.

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Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers. - Mrs. Fisher

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When Alice Ball made the discovery that brought leprosy patients back from certain death, she wasn't just young - she was also a black woman in Jim Crow-era America.

In 1915, a young black chemist named Alice Ball revolutionized the treatment for leprosy, a painful and stigmatized disease. Decades before the development of antibiotics, Ball devised a method for treating lepers that allowed them to live without being ostracized or isolated.

But how did Alice Ball, a black woman in Jim Crow-era America, become such a pioneer in science?

Alice Ball Was Born To Break Barriers

On July 24, 1892, Laura and James Ball welcomed their first daughter, Alice Ball, to their family.

The Balls lived in Seattle's Central District where James worked as a lawyer and Laura as a photographer. Alice Ball's grandfather was also a pioneer as one of the first photographers to use the daguerreotype method which prints images on metal plates.

During her childhood, Ball lived in Honolulu for a few years before returning to Seattle where she graduated from Seattle High School in 1910.

After receiving top marks, Ball enrolled at the University of Washington and studied pharmacy and chemistry. She earned a degree in pharmaceutical chemistry and returned to Hawaii for a master's degree in chemistry at the College of Hawaii, now the University of Hawaii.

She specialized in isolating the active components in the kava root, a plant native to the Pacific Islands, and while working on her master's, Ball published two articles in the world's most prestigious chemistry journal.

Upon her graduation in 1915, Ball became the first woman and the first black student to earn a master's degree in chemistry from the College of Hawaii.

The college then offered Ball a position as a chemistry instructor and she became the first woman to teach chemistry at the college - at just 23 years old.

In addition to her teaching, Ball continued working on plant biochemistry in the laboratory. Her work was quickly recognized by Dr. Harry T. Hollmann, the director of the Kalihi leprosy clinic, and he contacted Ball for help in finding a better treatment for the disease.

Traditional leprosy treatments relied on oil from the chaulmoogra tree that would be applied as a topical ointment, but this was not all that effective. Hollman wanted Ball to isolate the oil and create an injectable treatment instead.

Within a year, Ball did just that.

It would be the most important leprosy treatment before the advent of antibiotics.

Combatting A Death Sentence

Prior to Ball's innovation, leprosy - also known as Hansen's Disease - was considered an incurable disease with no effective treatments.

The disease also carried a heavy stigma. Lepers were isolated or shuttered away from their families at special colonies where they couldn't infect others. There was one such colony on the Hawaiian island of Molokai which housed 8,000 residents over the course of its existence. Indeed, the government even declared all the lepers there legally dead.

James Harnisch, head of the Hansen's Disease Clinic at the Harborview Medical Center, recently said that prior to the early 20th century, "There was no treatment at that point in time at all, so it was a matter of just offering care while you're watching the disease progress to destroy the face, destroy the hands, the arms. It was a very sad situation."

In 1873, scientists first identified the bacteria that caused leprosy. Yet the painful disease still had few effective treatments. A Chinese and Indian folk remedy involved oil from the chaulmoogra tree. But with no way to safely inject the oil, patients who tried this treatment were beset with painful side effects.

That is until Alice Ball developed her new method.

The Groundbreaking Ball Method Offered New Life To Lepers

In the lab, Alice Ball first successfully isolated the active ingredient in chaulmoogra oil.

"People were struggling with what do you do with this oil which, if you let it sit, it just hardens into, like, lard," explained Paul Wermager, head of the science library at the University of Hawaii. "But using alcohol you make it into what's called an ethyl ester. Then it becomes water-soluble, and that was the breakthrough that she made."

Ball created history's first effective and pain-relieving treatment for leprosy, appropriately named the "Ball Method."

At Molokai's leper colony, the "Ball Method" gave patients formerly seen as hopeless a new lease on life. The treatment eliminated their symptoms and proved so effective that leprosy patients around the world were discharged from their isolation in hospitals and sent home.

"People who did finally get the injections did show remarkable improvements," Wermager continued. "I've found photographs, and they're just startling. The person looks like, really, a different person."

Ball's Untimely Death And Legacy

In a preparatory lecture during World War I, Ball was showing her students how to properly use a gas mask. But an accident during the presentation exposed her to chlorine gas. As the Honolulu Pacific Commercial Advertiser explained, "While instructing her class in September 1916, Miss Ball suffered from chlorine poisoning."

Ball became seriously ill and returned to Seattle where she died within months at the age of 24.

Even in death, Alice Ball faced barriers in her scientific career when Dr. Arthur Dean, the president of the College of Hawaii, took credit for her research into chaulmoogra oil - and he even renamed her discovery the "Dean Method."

Fortunately, Dr. Hollmann, who first turned to Ball for help in treating leprosy, published a paper that named her as the true inventor of the method.

"You have to understand, she was doing this before women had the right to vote," explained Dr. Harnisch. "This is amazing. And again, she was an African American woman. Phenomenal that she could get this far."

Recently, Ball's groundbreaking career has finally received the attention it deserves. In 2017, Paul Wermager established a scholarship opportunity at the University of Hawaii to recognize her. He explained:

"Not only did she overcome the racial and gender barriers of her time to become one of the very few African American women to earn a master's degree in chemistry, [but she] also developed the first useful treatment for Hansen's disease."

Wermager adds, "Her amazing life was cut too short at the age of 24. Who knows what other marvelous work she could have accomplished had she lived."

Ball now holds a posthumous Medal of Distinction from the University of Hawaii and a plaque on campus reminds students and visitors of Ball's achievements. Hawaii recognizes February 29th as Alice Ball Day.
Alice Ball wasn't the only woman in science ignored by history. Learn about the female scientists who fought for their recognition. Then, check out these startling photographs of segregation in America.

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Meet Alice Ball, The 23-Year-Old Black Scientist Who Revolutionized Leprosy Treatment

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In 1915, a young black chemist named Alice Ball revolutionized the treatment for leprosy, a painful and stigmatized disease. Decades before the development of antibiotics, Ball devised a method for treating lepers that allowed them to live without being ostracized or isolated.

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Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist known for her pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, for which she was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Emmanuelle Charpentier. - Mr. Whiteaker

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What It Takes is an audio podcast produced by the American Academy of Achievement featuring intimate, revealing conversations with influential leaders in the diverse fields of endeavor: public service, science and exploration, sports, technology, business, arts and humanities, and justice.

I've always been fascinated with evolution. Why is life the way it is now? The code of life is evolving. I've always been very, very interested in that process. If there's a thread to my research over the years, that's always underlying what we do. It's thinking about evolution and how it works.

Jennifer Doudna was born in Washington, D.C., but when she was seven years old, the family moved to Hilo, Hawaii, and Jennifer became fascinated by the exotic plant and animal life she discovered there.

Her mother taught history at a local community college, and her father taught American literature at the University of Hawaii. The family home was full of books. Jennifer's father particularly enjoyed reading about science and natural history. When Jennifer was in the sixth grade, he gave her a copy of The Double Helix by James Watson, who had won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the DNA molecule. She was thrilled by the mystery and drama of scientific research as Watson described it.

Further inspired by her high school chemistry teacher, Jennifer Doudna studied biochemistry at Pomona College in Claremont, California, earning her bachelor's degree in 1985. She undertook graduate studies in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. Her dissertation research there was supervised by the geneticist Jack W. Szostak, who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Doudna's research concerned RNA (ribonucleic acid), a nucleic acid present in the cells of all living things. She focused specifically on ribozymes, molecules of RNA that catalyze biochemical reactions in proteins.

After receiving her doctorate in 1989, she continued her work with Dr. Szostak as a research fellow in molecular biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and in genetics at Harvard Medical School. In her research, Doudna had succeeded in altering the behavior of specific segments of RNA molecules, but further progress was thwarted by the mystery surrounding the actual molecular mechanism of the ribozyme.

In 1991, she moved to Boulder, Colorado, to pursue postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Cech, who had recently won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. In Cech's laboratory, she sought to crystallize molecules of RNA, the better to determine the three-dimensional structure of ribozymes and compare them with that of enzymes, the catalytic proteins. In Boulder, Doudna met a graduate student, Jamie Cate, who shared her research interests. His suggestions proved useful, and the collaboration ripened into a romance.

At the end of her Colorado fellowship in 1994, Doudna accepted an appointment as assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. Jamie Cate moved to New Haven with her, and the two were married.

At Yale, Doudna continued the project she had begun in Colorado, and by 1996, she and her group had succeeded in crystallizing the Tetrahymena group I ribozyme and employing x-ray crystallography to map the three-dimensional structure of its catalytic core. It was the first time the structure of a ribozyme had been revealed to the world. The following year, Doudna was named a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, an appointment that has provided material support for her research ever since.

Having mastered an essential technique, Doudna's group went on to crystallize other ribozymes, including that of the hepatitis delta virus. In 2000, Doudna received the Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation for her achievements and was promoted to full professor at Yale. During the following year, she also served as a visiting professor of chemistry at Harvard.

In 2002, Jennifer Doudna and Jamie Cate were both offered professorships at the University of California, Berkeley. Their son was born the same year, and they have made Berkeley their home ever since. Doudna continued to collect honors for her research; she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, and to the National Academy of Medicine in 2010.

Meanwhile, Doudna continued her research. She gained access to the synchrotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for her experiments with high-powered x-ray diffraction. Her work in Berkeley was to lead to her greatest discovery to date.

Doudna's laboratory entered into a long-distance collaboration with Emmanuelle Charpentier, a French biochemist who was working in Sweden at the time. Together, they were investigating the function of Cas9, a protein found in the immune system of Streptococcus bacteria. The Streptococcus immune system functions through "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats" (CRISPR), slicing through the DNA of hostile antibodies to disable them. Doudna, Charpentier, and their colleagues hypothesized that CRISPR-Cas9 could be deployed to edit the genome of living things, including human beings. In 2012, they demonstrated that RNA molecules could be programmed to cut and edit targeted DNA molecules.

Attempts to edit the genome had met with limited success in the past, but CRISPR technology offered the field of genetic science a swift and efficient technique with nearly limitless possibilities, not only for basic research but for the treatment and prevention of genetic disease. With her former student Rachel Haurwitz, Doudna has founded a company, Caribou Biosciences, that is now developing CRISPR technology to address issues such as antimicrobial resistance, food scarcity, and vaccine shortages.

When Doudna and Charpentier made their findings public, the news flew around the world. Along with the promise of preventing incurable genetic diseases, the new technology revived longstanding fears about the possible abuse of genetic research. Some journalists speculated that the new technology would lead to the creation of "designer babies" or misguided attempts to build a "super race." Jennifer Doudna herself was among the first to answer these concerns. In a widely distributed TED talk, she called for an international discussion to develop appropriate regulation of gene editing technology.

In 2014, Jennifer Doudna was the recipient of the Lurie Prize in the Biomedical Sciences from the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health. The following year, she received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and was named one of TIME magazine's "100 Most Influential People." She has since received the Gruber Prize in Genetics, the Canada Gairdner International Award, and the Japan Prize. She was elected a Foreign Member of Britain's Royal Society in 2016. Jennifer Doudna shared her findings - and her concerns - with the general public in her 2017 book, A Crack in Creation.

Jennifer Doudna and her collaborators at Berkeley applied for a patent on their research, but a group at the Harvard-MIT Broad Institute sought a patent for similar work they had carried out independently. Although Doudna and Charpentier published their findings first, the U.S. Patent Office granted the Broad Institute the patent because the Broad researchers claimed to be first to edit genes in cultured human cells. Berkeley filed a lawsuit contesting the decision of the Patent Office.

A 2017 federal court decision favored the Broad Institute's claim, a decision upheld on appeal in 2018, although Berkeley has since received 20 CRISPR patents in the United States. European courts have rejected the Broad Institute's claim, and a resolution of the conflict between the two institutions is anticipated.

Meanwhile, scientists around the world have applied CRISPR to cell biology and a broad spectrum of plant and animal research. Commercial food scientists are employing CRISPR technology to amplify flavors and to create disease-resistant produce. Medical scientists are pursuing treatments for sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease and HIV. Other researchers have extracted blood cells from patients with cancer and blood diseases, edited the cells and returned them the patients with promising results. Editing of cells within the human body is now being tested to treat diseases of the eye and liver.

Because CRISPR technology is comparatively efficient and inexpensive, many see great danger in unregulated experimentation by unaccountable researchers. The United States Food and Drug Administration is prohibited from approving any studies that involve editing the human germline - eggs or sperm - and both China and the European Union are also attempting to block such research. Despite the Chinese ban, in 2019 one unaffiliated researcher in China reported tampering with the genes of a pair of twins in embryo and received criminal penalties including three years' imprisonment and a six-figure fine.

Since 2018, Jennifer Doudna has held the position of senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, in addition to her professorships in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at Berkeley. She directs the Genomics Institute, a joint center of the University of California's Berkeley and San Francisco campuses. At Berkeley, she holds a Chancellor's Professorship in Biomedicine and Health, and is the chair of the Chancellor's Advisor Committee on Biology.

The ongoing research of the renowned Doudna Lab at Berkeley seeks a deeper understanding of all biological processes involving RNA. Doudna's group has learned how the hepatitis C virus synthesizes viral proteins - work that could lead to new antiviral drugs with fewer side effects. Jennifer Doudna has co-founded a number of companies to market CRISPR-related products, including Caribou Biosciences and Mammoth Biosciences. She also serves on the board of pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson.

Jennifer Doudna and her family continue to live in Berkeley. Jamie Cate is a professor at the University of California and works at the nearby Energy Biosciences Institute, with a team pursuing gene editing for the production of biofuels. Jamie and Jennifer's son is also reportedly considering a career in the sciences.

In 2020, Jennifer Doudna and her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It is the first time two female scientists have shared the chemistry prize. In making the award, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted that they have "revolutionized basic science."

Inducted in 2017

Jennifer Doudna had recently arrived at Berkeley to accept a professorship in biochemistry when a colleague drew her attention to unusual bacteria found in an abandoned mine. The property of a single protein, Cas9, found in this microbe, led her to a revolutionary new technique of editing the genome.

Known as CRISPR (for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats"), the technique she demonstrated is many times faster and far more precise than all previously existing methods. Only five years after Doudna first published her findings, researchers all over the world were using CRISPR to explore potential treatments for cancer and diseases of the immune system. The technology also offers the possibility of preventing birth defects and inherited disease, though Doudna herself opposes the concept of so-called "designer babies," or non-therapeutic tinkering with the human genome.

In 2016, Dr. Doudna was awarded the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, endowed by leading Internet entrepreneurs. She has shared the significance of her discoveries with the public in her book A Crack in Creation. In awarding her the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences hailed her for "rewriting the code of life."

Can you remember a moment when you first realized the potential of what you were doing, that it could end certain diseases? What did it feel like?
Jennifer Doudna: I had a wonderful email from a former student in my lab who is now studying for his M.D.-Ph.D., but at the time, he was working in our research lab here at UC Berkeley, and he reminded me of a wonderful day when I was - which, in retrospect, is wonderful. At the time, it was just business as usual.

I was in the lab with a lab member of mine, Martin Jinek, who was the person who was doing work on a protein called Cas9, part of the CRISPR system. We call it CRISPR-Cas9. And we were trying to figure out how it worked. It was pretty clearly an RNA-guided enzyme that could find and cut DNA. And the question was: "How does it do that? Does it do that, and if it does, how does it work?"

He was doing experiments to answer that question. And he eventually figured out that this system could be programmed, literally, with different segments of RNA that have the same sequence of chemical letters that match those letters in DNA. That's what allows it to be programmed to find and cut DNA at a particular place in a cell.

And this student of mine, whose name is Prashant Bhat, reminded me of a day when he came into the lab to do his experiments. He saw me and Martin Jinek leaning over a light box in our lab - which was a way of visualizing the data from one of Martin's experiments - in which we were just looking at each other and high-fiving, and we were just so excited. And why? It was because that was the first experiment where Martin had showed how the system could be programmed, and also how we could simplify it compared to what nature had done.

We turned it into a two-component system, just one type of RNA and one protein that were necessary for this RNA-guided, DNA-cutting reaction to work, this chemistry to happen. And I think, for us, that was really - that precious email from Prashant Bhat reminded me of that - one of those moments that we all live for as scientists, where you make a discovery that you realize is profound in a way. It was much bigger than the experiment began. It's something that could have big implications because of the way it works.
Did you really high-five each other in the lab?
Jennifer Doudna: Well, whether we really did that is probably up for debate. And the reason I say that is because, knowing Martin Jinek, he's a very subdued individual. He's very scholarly, and he would always try to - I would get very excited about things and he would always tell me, "Now, Jennifer, no. We have to wait. I've got to do another control, and I've got to repeat that experiment. Before we get excited, let's make sure."
How do you describe what CRISPR is to the layperson?

Jennifer Doudna: CRISPR is really a fabulous tool for doing surgery on DNA, and it's basically a way to alter the code of life. It's a way to change the DNA sequence in cells so precisely that we can now alter a single letter in the code of a human cell. A human cell has six billion individual letters - three billion base pairs of those letters. We can change a single one with this technology and do other things as well. So I think that this has given scientists a way to rewrite DNA that provides opportunities both for fundamental research to understand what the DNA code is telling us about the way life is, as well as to - in the future - do things that will probably correct disease-causing mutations, create plants that are better adapted to their environments, and many other things.

So let's say we have a book with thousands of words. Basically, now you can go in and take out the misspelled word, or in this case a disease gene.
Jennifer Doudna: That's correct. Yes. The idea is that you can actually correct a disease-causing mutation, even something as small as a single letter that's gone awry.
What are the most exciting applications for this?
Jennifer Doudna: Well, there's many, but I think the ones that are probably closest along include curing sickle cell anemia, which is a disease that involves a single letter that needs to be corrected in a single gene of a human cell, a human red blood cell. That's something that has already been cured in cells growing in laboratories, and also in animal models, and we're now at a point where several groups are about to begin clinical trials in people.
How about all the women that we know that carry a gene that makes them more likely to have breast cancer? Can you edit that out?
Jennifer Doudna: BRCA1, BRCA2, yeah, these are mutations well known to correlate with a high risk for breast and ovarian cancers in women. Right now, it would be difficult to use gene editing to correct that mutation - not because we can't do it in individual cells, but because it would be hard to correct it in every cell of the body. So I think that's, quite frankly, one of the current challenges with the technology, is just delivering it into cells and tissues.

The reason that sickle cell anemia is one of the first targets clinically is because cells can be edited outside the body and then replaced, and that can be done in a way where those cells then take over the blood supply in the person and replace the cells that are defective with cells that are corrected.
Can you tell us about other uses for this amazing tool?

Jennifer Doudna: One of the amazing things about this technology is that it's really opened the door to experiments that scientists are doing in many different kinds of organisms to understand how they work and why they are the way they are. What in their DNA makes wheat susceptible to certain kinds of funguses, or fungi? What is it in people that makes us have certain kinds of properties in our bodies? What in our DNA creates certain traits? I think that is something that maybe most people who are outside of science don't realize, but there's been an enormous uptick in the pace of scientific research that's driven by the power of this technology to allow scientists to ask questions in their laboratories that could never be asked in the past.

In ten years, what do you think this technology might do in terms of everyday life? How many people will it have touched?

Jennifer Doudna: I think many of us will, by then, because I think we'll all be eating food and using crops and plants that will be genome edited. I think that we will be benefiting from medical breakthroughs that will have happened due to genome editing. Whether it's an actual therapy or not, we'll certainly benefit from the biomedical knowledge that's coming from using this technology to understand the cause of disease, for example - and to really kind of start to get at this whole opportunity of personalized medicine that really comes down to, you know, every one of us is a little bit different, based on our DNA. And understanding that, at a molecular level, I think, is coming.

And then, I think, also, we didn't talk about this, but benefiting from other applications of CRISPR, whether it's controlling the spread of mosquito-borne disease, whether it's making chemicals in research laboratories or in commercial settings that are made using bacteria or fungi instead of polluting chemical processes - I think that's also coming with CRISPR, sort of "synthetic biology" is what we call it. So I think, within ten years, probably all of us will have many things that touch our lives that will come from CRISPR.

Could CRISPR be used to treat something like depression, or is that too linked to individual personality?

Jennifer Doudna: Well, that question, to me, really brings up a couple of different but important points. One is that something like depression is not the result of a single gene or even a handful of genes. It's almost certainly the result of hundreds or thousands of genes, as well as the environment that a person has experienced. So it's going to be very complicated to try to - even if we wanted to - to fix it with genome editing, at least the way the technology is right now. And the other thing is - the other point about your question that's so interesting - is that it sort of gets to this question of what makes us human. What makes us unique as individuals? What do we value about the diversity of our life here on Earth? I think that, for many people, the diversity of life is one of the things that makes it so rich and so wonderful. So we wouldn't want to have a way to make us all the same.

It gets into the whole question of eugenics and access. Who decides? Who regulates this? Who makes those decisions? Who pays for it? Who should be allowed to do this? All of these kinds of questions. And again, I want to emphasize that the technology today doesn't allow that yet, but it's close enough that we know we need to be considering those questions.
In your book A Crack in Creation, you wrote that not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about it. That's quite a statement, and you actually were one of the ones who were convening people and saying, "Hold on here, let's look at what we're creating." Did you get pushback from that?
Jennifer Doudna: I would say I didn't get pushback, but definitely, we heard a lot of different opinions about the technology, as you would want, I think, in a conversation. I'm thinking, in particular, about a meeting that I convened with my colleagues in January of 2015, a small meeting up in the Napa Valley. We just had some clinicians, some fundamental researchers. We also had scientists who had been involved in the discussions of ethics of molecular cloning back in the 1970s in attendance. It was really a meeting to start grappling with: We've got this powerful technology of genome editing; it's moving incredibly rapidly in the scientific arena. And yet, none of our government regulators at that time - or many people outside of science - knew anything about it. So it was this weird kind of feeling of sitting on something so powerful and moving so fast, and it could affect many, many people, and yet most of them weren't even aware of it yet.
That meeting in Napa - was there some unintended thing that you learned from gathering those minds up there?
Jennifer Doudna: There was a wonderful comment that was made by a colleague of mine up there.

I remember sitting around a table - about the size of the table in this room - and debating, in particular, about this issue of human embryo editing. Should people do that? Is that something that we should be trying to work towards or work against, or how do we think about that? And a lot of people around the table were talking about all the dangers of doing it and how risky it could be, et cetera, et cetera. And then, at one point, a colleague of mine leaned across the table and said, "Wait a minute. At some point, this technology may be accurate enough that we'll all realize that it would be unethical not to use it that way, to correct the disease-causing mutation for cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease or things like that." And it made everybody stop and think for a minute and just say, "Wow. We could turn this whole question on its head."

What worries you most about the new technology that you're working on?
Jennifer Doudna: Well, it might surprise you, maybe, but the thing I feel most worried about today is really just - I worry about the pace of this technology outpacing our collective ability to understand the implications of what it does. What I mean by that is that I think that for scientists to race ahead to do things that we can do, but, to coin a phrase from that wonderful line in Jurassic Park by Jeff Goldblum - love it! - "We can do it doesn't mean we should do it." And I think it's really that. It's wanting to make sure that scientists are thinking about the implications of their work, especially with respect to genome editing, prior to just rushing forward.
There are such upsides. You can make a drought-resistant plant and save people from dying of hunger. You might soon hopefully end some cancers. With so much upside, how do you regulate?

Jennifer Doudna: It's a complicated issue because science is global, of course, and people are working in every part of the world now using CRISPR-Cas9 technology, as well as many other technologies. And how do we create a regulatory framework that people will honor in these different jurisdictions? How do we create even a community of scientists where there's kind of a code of ethics that everybody would buy into?

In my view, it really does have to begin with kind of a grassroots effort. It has to begin with scientists coming together and discussing these topics, and I've been involved in convening meetings around this. Fortunately, I think that idea has really spread in the genome editing field to include now people - not just scientists - but also people that are stakeholders, whether they be patients with genetic diseases, or clinicians that hope to use this in the future, or agricultural scientists who want to use it in plants and other types of applications.

So we are seeing a pretty broad cohort of people that are starting to attend these meetings and are interested in the topic. But I think the real challenge ahead is to figure out how to put all of that effort and energy into a cohesive document or consensus kind of opinion piece that people could buy into.

Do scientists agree that we shouldn't have designer babies? That we shouldn't edit the human embryo?
Jennifer Doudna: Oh, certainly they don't agree on that, not at all. I think, for many people, the opportunity to correct a disease-causing mutation at the time of conception rather than having to wait and do it much later is an attractive idea. The difficulty is in thinking about all of the other implications of that kind of genome editing, as well as the technical challenges with it.
When people talk about you, they say that "Dr. Doudna has the golden touch. She knows what to work on." Do you think that's fair?
Jennifer Doudna: That's interesting that you say that, or that people say that.

When I was in graduate school, I worked with a wonderful scientist, Jack Szostak. And that's how I felt about him. I felt like the thing that he had so wonderfully - and it was kind of one of those je ne sais quoi, hard-to-put-your-finger-on-it sorts of traits - is that he had that quality, I felt. He knew the right experiments to do. He knew the right questions to ask.

He didn't know the answers because that's why we do science, but he knew the right ones to ask, and I always thought to myself, "Gosh, if I could bottle that up somehow and figure out what that is." And I never imagined that people would see me that way, but I know I really consciously tried to understand that about the people that I've trained with because I think I have benefited from mentors who were able to do that very beautifully.

I've always been driven by a fascination with evolution. Why is life the way it is now? And, of course, we're seeing life on our planet at a snapshot in time. It was different in the past, and it will be different in the future. And it's all strung together by DNA, right? The code of life is kind of evolving over time. And I've always been very, very interested in that process. So I feel like, if there's a thread to my research over the years, that's kind of always underlying what we do, is thinking about evolution and how it works.

If you had to say what you think your gift is, is it seeing things ahead of time? Is it working with people? There are many smart biochemists, but there's only one you. What do you think is your gift?

Jennifer Doudna: I think that I've always had a knack for experimental science. It's a feeling I have about both the questions that I want to try to answer that I think are important, as well as the way to go about doing that. And I once heard my post-doc advisor, Tom Cech - another very wonderful, celebrated scientist, a Nobel laureate - he once described me as somebody who had a map in her head of experiments that were to be done and could sort of see a whole process. And it was, somehow, when he said that about me, that I kind of realized, "Gosh, I think he's right. That is how my mind works." I hadn't really thought about it before, but I think that is what I would say about me, is that I always have had kind of a talent there of thinking about how I'm going to do experiments, and I still have it. You know, when I meet with people in my lab, I find that, even though, sadly, I'm not in my lab anymore doing actual experiments, I'm still good at thinking about how to do those experiments, which ones are important to do, and how to set them up so that we get data that are going to tell us something meaningful.

That's fascinating. When you wake up in the morning, do you have a vision of a map? What does it look like?

Jennifer Doudna: It's not really visual. It's not something I could draw on a piece of paper. It's more a process, in a way, right? It's almost like a flowchart. It's sort of thinking, "Okay, if we want to figure this out, we could do this, and then this, and then, depending on how that works out, we can do this or this," you know, that kind of thing. It's almost like a flowchart. And there's a logic there. And then I'll think, "Okay, and if we want to do that experiment, I know we need these controls so that we can interpret the data," and then I'll start thinking about how to- logistically - how to get all the pieces to - this person would be good at doing this one thing, this other person over here would be great to help us out with this other thing, that person over there would be a great collaborator because they know how to do something that we don't know how to do. That kind of thing. So I do love team-building and thinking about how do you - if you want to answer a question in the lab, how do you do it? Both, which experiments to do, and also, "How do I bring the right people together to do those experiments?" I love doing that. It's fun.

How do you think growing up in Hawaii affected your work, later in life?
Jennifer Doudna: I loved where I grew up. It was such a magical place in many ways. It was sort of a kid's dream, you know. We had the freedom to run around in the afternoons, and we were definitely checking out our sugarcane fields, snacking on occasional cane stalks, but also exploring guava trees, and running around in the huge tall California grass that grew in the back of our house. It was just a wonderful experience of the native world.
You called it the sleeping grass?
Jennifer Doudna: Sleeping grass, yeah. It would sit there, and when you stepped on it, it'd poke you, but then it would close up, the leaves would close up. It seemed like some kind of interesting chemistry going on there. I wanted to figure that one out.
Do you think you were more curious about the natural world than other kids?
Jennifer Doudna: I didn't think about it, honestly. I felt like one of the neighborhood kids, you know. I played kickball. I liked to play kickball out in the street. I had a horse. I used to ride horseback and ride in 4-H little rodeo events and things like that. So I just had a pretty active outdoor - very outdoor kind of life.
When you were growing up among the sugarcane fields in Hawaii, do you remember some of the first questions you wanted to answer?
Jennifer Doudna: Oh, there were so many. I wondered why sleeping grass closes when you touch it. What's going on? What's the chemistry there? I wondered about, you know, I would walk on lava rock, and I would see all these colors and shapes in the rock, and I would wonder why. Why did lava in one part of the island look so different from lava on other parts of the island? There must be different chemistry going on there. I was always thinking about the chemistry under it. I wanted to know about that, and then, just about the plant life. I mean there were so many fascinating plants growing in Hawaii that I didn't see growing anywhere else, and I always wondered, "Why is that?" So things like that.
Your father taught American literature and your mother taught history. So were books a big deal in your house? How old were you when you read The Double Helix?
Jennifer Doudna: Books were a big deal. We had a lot of those. My dad, his specialty was Henry David Thoreau, so we had multiple copies of Walden around our house and people reading Walden at various dinner tables. That was something that happened quite regularly. My dad also loved reading all kinds of things outside of his specialty, including about science. So one of the really cool things for me, growing, up was that, without even really thinking about it, I got exposed to some really interesting science writers, people like Lewis Thomas - and James Watson with The Double Helix, his book about the discovery of the DNA structure - and books written by medical doctors who were sleuthing the cause of disease in patients. So there were quite a range of things that my dad read or gave to me to read and that we discussed in our house that I think really gave me a sense of what it was like to be a scientist.
And what was interesting about it?
Jennifer Doudna: I think I was in middle school. I was 12 or 13.

Jennifer Doudna: Well, hindsight is always 20/20. People now say, "Well, weren't you struck by Rosalind Franklin's role and how she was maybe treated by these scientists?" Actually, I didn't think about that at the time. Isn't that interesting? I was so captivated by the story of discovering the structure of DNA. I was so amazed by the possibility that you could, as a scientist, ask a question that detailed and figure out the answer. It seemed amazing.
As a junior in high school, you heard a lecture about why cells become cancerous. What effect did that have on you?
I guess, for me, that was the first time that I had a sense of science as a process - you know what I mean? - as a growing, living thing that was created by people rather than, you know, when you're in grade school. You have science textbooks that, at least in my day, were pretty cut-and-dried, and science seemed kind of boring. It seemed like memorizing a lot of facts, and it didn't seem all that interesting to me. But when I read The Double Helix, that was the first time I had the sense of being a sleuth. You're on a trail, you're hunting something down, you're trying to figure something out, and you've got just bits and pieces of data, and you've got to try to put a story together. That was amazing to me.
How old were you?
Jennifer Doudna: In high school, I had - in tenth grade - had a fabulous chemistry class. Miss Wong was our teacher, and she was very good at helping us kids understand the process of doing science - that science is experiments. You ask a question and then you figure out how to answer it in the laboratory. So for me, I became very interested in chemistry, but I knew I liked the living natural world. So those were just nebulous interests of mine at the time. And then, when I heard this lecture by a biochemist talking about her research into why cells become cancerous, it suddenly gelled for me. I realized that's what I want to do: I want to figure out the chemistry of living things. I want to understand the molecules that go awry in a cell that becomes a cancer cell. How does that work?
Was there anything else about Miss Wong that made an impression?
Jennifer Doudna: I was probably 15 at the time, 15 or 16.
Now you've been in a lot of rooms with scientists. How often are you still either the only woman or one of the only women?
Jennifer Doudna: I certainly didn't know any female scientists at that time, except the famous ones - Marie Curie - but I didn't know anybody living that was a female scientist. I just didn't know them. So it seemed really exotic to me to - first of all - see this lecture by a woman scientist, and secondly, to think to myself, "Wow! I wonder if I could do that. I wonder if I could be a scientist." I still remember I had this little chill of thinking,"It would be really weird and wild to become a scientist. I wonder if I could really do that?"

Jennifer Doudna: I think there's been a lot of advances for women - certainly in my area in the biological sciences - over the last few decades. So I feel very fortunate that right now, in my department at the University of California, Berkeley, for example, we have quite a good number of women at all stages of their career, from very senior tenured women to women who are just starting their research.
Do you think women scientists work differently than men do?
But that being said, I find that we still see that in the more senior levels of academic science, as well as all across the business world, there definitely is a lack of women that you see. And I do experience things like - especially business meetings or higher level administrative meetings - where I find that there aren't very many women in the room. Occasionally, I'm the only one.

Jennifer Doudna: There's been a lot written about that. I think there are some trends that I see that are different between the genders. But generally, that's not really how I think about things. I tend to just think of myself primarily, when I'm in a professional setting, as in the context of my work, and what I know about, and what I can contribute to.
You have two sisters: one who's in the arts, one who works for the government, and then you have this great science brain. The same parents, different kids. Since we're talking about genetics, how do you understand these differences?
I think that it is true - or certainly, I've seen in my experience - that I think women tend to not trust themselves as much as maybe they should, not to put themselves forward as much as maybe they should. So I always encourage all students in my lab - but especially women - if I see them maybe doing that, to tell them, "Yes, you are good enough to apply for that job. Yes, you should apply for that fellowship. Yes, please do apply to attend that graduate program. You are good enough to do it." And just to have self-confidence, trust themselves, and to try things, take a risk. I think sometimes women talk themselves out of things when they don't need to.
What about your other interests? What do you do to relax and have fun?
Jennifer Doudna: It's genetics in action! It's hard to say. Yeah, we're all really different in many ways. Not in every way. You can tell we're from the same family in certain ways, but I think that we all have really different interests, and that's something that's made our family fun. I think I saw that in my parents, too. Like, I described my father being a literature professor who was nonetheless very interested in science, and I could see, had he a different lifetime - or there was an alternate universe or something - he could have easily been a scientist, I think.
Do you think these things increase your creativity or help with your work?
Jennifer Doudna: I like gardening. I love playing with plants. I'm a big tomato fan. I grow tomatoes at home. I grow flowers, herbs. So I do a fair amount of that. And also, I'm very much an outdoors enthusiast, so I do a fair amount of hiking, biking, running, things like that. I run 10K races occasionally with my son, and that's fun.
Can you think of an example?
Jennifer Doudna: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I have found that I tend to have my best ideas and creative moments when I'm not in the lab, you know, when I'm doing something else. I'm thinking about something else seemingly, and suddenly, I'll think, "Wait a minute. This would be a really cool thing to do in the lab." And I also find that a lot of times, especially if I've been relaxing a little bit, or just not focusing on work for some period of time - either a little vacation or even just taking a day off of work or spending time on the weekends going for a hike - I'll often find that it's those moments that will stimulate a creative new idea. I'll wake up in the morning thinking about our science, and I'll suddenly think, "Oh wait, there's something really interesting here. We should pursue that."

Jennifer Doudna: I guess, if we go back to the early days for us with CRISPR, even before the molecules that we worked on that are now being used for genome editing, I was actually studying with a couple of my lab members how bacteria fight viral infection using a system known as CRISPR.

In those days, we were studying some of the proteins that are responsible for cutting up the pieces of RNA, which are the chemical labels that these proteins use to find other molecules in bacteria. And it was really - I had gone on a small hike with a couple of my lab members up in - I think we were in Muir Woods, which is - for those folks that know Northern California, you probably know Muir Woods - but if you don't, it's a beautiful redwood forest that was established many decades ago that really has preserved the beauty of redwood trees here in the Northern California area.

So anyhow, we were up there hiking, and in the course of that hike, we were just kind of chitchatting about various things, not necessarily science, but when I got back from that hike, I was talking with one of the students in the lab, Rachel Haurwitz, who is now a very successful CEO of a company that we founded together.
When you focus consciously on a problem, what's that like?
But in that conversation, we talked about some of the work that we were doing in the lab, and I think, for me, that was maybe one of the first moments where I started thinking that the work we were doing could be useful as a technology. I wasn't necessarily thinking about genome editing at that moment, but I was thinking about ways that we could use CRISPR proteins to find pieces of viral DNA and RNA and how we might be able to use that as a research tool. So, for me, that was, in a way, the beginning of really thinking about these CRISPR systems both as a curiosity-driven research project but also as a potential source of new technology.
So when you're talking about literally rewriting the code of life or hopefully eradicating some diseases that afflict millions of people, how do you have a balanced life? Don't you feel like you should be in the lab all the time?
Jennifer Doudna: I kind of get into a zone. I have a desk in my kitchen at home, and that's often where I'll sit. I can look out at my garden, and that's always a source of inspiration, at some level. But I'll often sit there when I'm working or thinking or reading. A lot of times, I'm reading and I'm taking notes and I'm kind of puzzling something out. Sometimes it's just, I'm out weeding my tomato plants and, like I said, suddenly something will come to me, and I'll think, "Ooh!" And then the other thing is that I found that I have to keep a notebook by the side of my bed because it's not uncommon that I'll wake up at some hour of the day or night - early day or late night - and have an idea and think, "Ooh, that's interesting. I want to pursue that." And I'll just jot it down. I'm usually scribbling in the dark. It's like I can't see. I'm just trying to scribble enough that I can read it in the morning and remember the idea.

Jennifer Doudna: Sure. But you know, there's always juggling going on with everything, even at work. In my younger years, I was a real lab rat. I just worked a lot because I wanted to. I just loved it. I love being in the lab. I love the feeling of discovery, but I also had - I'm a realist, too, and students that might be watching this might be thinking, "But science can be so frustrating," and I hear you. It can be.

So I think, for me, it was critical that I had other things to distract me from my frustrations at times at work. I always loved gardening, for example. I've always had a little garden growing wherever I lived. I've always done a lot of hiking and biking, and when I lived in Colorado, I did rollerblading and just getting outdoors and getting away from things that way.

But nowadays, I have to balance my love of work and research in the lab with my son's needs, the fact that I have a husband at home, and a family to spend time with, and I also am responsible for my mother, up until recently. So just things like that. I think it's always about balance.
When you say supportive, what's the key thing that he does?
It's absolutely possible, and I have many friends who are also women, highly successful, have families and they figure it out. I think it helps to have a really supportive partner. That's what I've found. It's incredibly helpful. My husband is the most supportive partner on the planet.
Have you ever felt like you should give your son some very important book, as your father gave you?
Jennifer Doudna: He's a great all-around parent, confidant, fellow scientist, colleague, romantic partner all bundled into one. And so I think, for us, we've always viewed our relationship as, we have our private life and our family and our son, and we also have our science together, and we enjoy both. We kind of wear different hats, even with each other. Also, my husband is very understanding about my - especially now - my crazy schedule, my travel. I travel a lot. So he's the one, more than me, frankly, who is going to the high school meetings with my son, and going to robotics competitions with our son, helping to coach their team, just all of the things that you really need a parent to do.
So many people who are great in math also have some extra ability in music. Do you play music?
Jennifer Doudna: I haven't really done that. Maybe I should. We do read a lot in our house. I brought a book home last night, and I had it sitting on the kitchen table, and my son saw it, and he said, "Oh, what's that, Mom? What's that book?" And it's a novel, but it's written by a young man who - not so young anymore, more like my age - who is Vietnamese, and it's kind of a novel about the Vietnam War. He thought it looked really interesting. So we read all sorts of things in the house. My son actually loves math and he's a bit of a math whiz. So the kinds of books that he tends to read for fun are actually fun books about mathematics. So those are ones that he turns me on to.
What do you think he'll end up doing?
Jennifer Doudna: I think that skipped a generation. My mother played the piano. I tried and it kind of never gelled for me. Now my son is a great piano player and also plays viola, and I asked him recently, "If you somehow didn't pursue science, what else would you do?" and he said, "Oh, I'd be a musician."
It's so hard to predict when these talents or interests will appear or to know where they come from. One of the things that worries people about genetic engineering is the idea that someone will try to use science to create a "super race." Do you think that's a realistic fear?
Jennifer Doudna: I think my son wants to be some kind of an engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, physicist. He loves the physical sciences.
The germline?
Jennifer Doudna: Not really. It's kind of a science fiction-y kind of fear. I think, for many reasons, that's not something that we have to worry about right now or even in the near future. I do think that, you know, making changes to the human germline is coming.
Has anyone done that so far?
Jennifer Doudna: The germline - that means making changes to the DNA that become inheritable. So they change the DNA, not just in an individual, but in their children, and all of their progeny going forward - all of their children's children. So it becomes an inherited trait. That's a profound thing. There's no doubt that this is coming.
At this moment, it's illegal to do that in the United States, isn't it?
Jennifer Doudna: It was announced at a meeting in Hong Kong last November by a scientist who said that he had actually made changes to the germline of two baby girls who were born. I think that announcement catalyzed a lot of the conversations. I think that's really motivating people to move with a bit more speed and focus in terms of understanding the technology today, where it's going, and how we ensure responsible use.
But that's not true in other countries, and that could change in the United States.
Jennifer Doudna: Yeah. It wouldn't be possible to do it for a couple of reasons. One is that federal funding is not available. It cannot be used for any kind of human embryo work - not just genome editing - any kind of human embryo research. And the other is that the Food and Drug Administration that reviews any kind of clinical therapeutics or procedures is not allowed to even review a procedure that would affect human embryos, as we're talking about.
You've compared this in a way to the creation of the atom bomb. Just to give people an idea of the possible applications, and the changes that this technology is bringing, what else could we compare it to?
Jennifer Doudna: Yeah, it could. It could. And in other countries, you're right. They have different types of regulatory structures in other places. So there's no doubt in my mind that that kind of use will happen in the future. It's a question of when, not if.

Jennifer Doudna: We could certainly compare it to the early days of - I would call it modern molecular biology - molecular cloning. This was back in the 1970s, when scientists first began making copies of particular pieces of DNA, being able to clone the insulin gene, for example, to make insulin for people that are diabetic and do that in an industrial setting. That was also revolutionary. It was the birth of companies like Genentech, and now, many, many other biotechnology companies that are creating the therapies that many people are benefiting from today. So it's sort of that. I would say we're sort of at another kind of revolution of that nature, where it's now possible to do things that just a few short years ago scientists didn't have access to.

After Dolly the sheep was created by cloning in the mid-1990s, there was a lot of hysteria. People were afraid someone would start cloning people. Now it's 20 years after Dolly and we haven't seen any cloned people.
A patent's supposed to give legal ownership to the discovery, isn't it?
Jennifer Doudna: Partly. That's probably for many reasons, but partly it's technical, quite honestly. I think cloning people turns out to be very hard. Even cloning more sheep like Dolly is not a trivial thing to do. It's not something that very many people have access to the tools to do or the knowledge to do. And that's where genome editing is a bit different. It's a tool that is widely available. Scientists don't need to be specialists, particularly, to be able to use it, and that's one of the wonders of it. It's a great democratizing tool that has given scientists around the globe the power to alter the code of life in different cellular settings, but it also means that it's much harder to control it.

Jennifer Doudna: Well, what it does is it provides protection for the use of that idea or technology, so that companies - if they want to commercialize that technology, they have some protection to do so and to create things and products and charge money for them, without worrying about competitors immediately stealing their idea. That's sort of the whole goal of the patenting process, is to give opportunities for companies, and for investors in those companies, to be able to trust that if they invest in a company, they can develop something without immediately having competitors able to capture all of that work and make money on it separately from them.
What does "interference" mean, in a legal context?
So what's happening right now with the CRISPR-Cas9 patent situation is that recently the University of California has had a whole series of our patents issuing, and we have quite a large number that are about to be issued. So that's creating a situation where we now have patents at the University of California as well as patents at MIT Broad Institute, and frankly, many, many other institutions. So the U.S. Patent Office is going to have to again sort out what's the primacy of those patents. And we expect that there will be another interference coming that will allow the Patent Office to ask that question in a legal sense.
And billions of dollars are at stake.
Jennifer Doudna: Interference means that you have two patents that make the same claims, some kind of technologies or claims that are overlapping. So then there has to be a resolution of that. If that were to not happen, for some reason, then you have what we have today, which is that the University of California has issued patents, MIT Broad Institute has issued patents, and there's some overlap in the claims of those patents. So anybody wanting to use this technology commercially needs to have a license to both parties' patents. So it's not ideal.
How do you see it playing out?
Jennifer Doudna: I think that's right. If you look at the market capitalization values of companies that are already traded in the public markets, they're in the billions of dollars, collectively, and there are many, many more companies that are using the technology, as well as companies that are getting started that will build value over time.
Has the patent fight turned nastier than you thought?
Jennifer Doudna: I think there are different scenarios for how it could play out. It's not clear yet. I think, if this interference is declared, then that will provide a legal platform for figuring out, really, who invented this technology and who should have the primary patents to it. If that doesn't happen, then it will be sorted out probably with lawsuits in the courts eventually.
If you fixed or improved the patent system, what would you do?
Jennifer Doudna: Is the patent fight nastier than I thought? Yes. I think that's been one of the worst parts of this whole experience for me, honestly. Yeah. I couldn't have prepared for it, and I've tried to view it as part of my education. And sometimes education's painful. Sometimes the way you learn things in life is through pain. This is one of them for me. It just is. But I try to view it as part of my education. It's part about learning about people and their behavior, learning about the patenting process itself, and why do we do it, and how does it work. And in many ways, I feel it's sort of broken, but this is the system that we have and we have to work with it. There also are occasional glimmers of light. I guess I was incredibly happy that my university has stuck up for me. They have. They could have let me just drift away. They could have just turned their back, and they didn't, and that means a lot to me.

Jennifer Doudna: Well, I would find a way to protect ideas in a way that would enable them more. I guess I'm particularly referring to technologies like CRISPR that are, frankly, so enabling to so many people that it's actually not a good idea to squirrel them away. You really want to get them into as many people's hands as possible and let them take over the creative process with that tool. Use the tool - whether it's a hammer or a gene editing molecule - use it to do creative things. Build the house or build the cell and make those products. And to have a system that inhibits that somehow, with a foundational technology like that, it's not a good idea.
There's all this competition involved in the patent process now, but didn't your initial work on CRISPR-Cas9 stem from collaboration? Weren't you working with scientists from another institution?
How would I do it differently? It's very hard to say. How can I come up with a better system? I ask myself that occasionally, and I don't have a good answer, but I do think that we do need to collectively come up with a system that will make technologies like this - and there are others, of course, and there will be ones in the future - make those widely available, so that they can be advanced as quickly as possible towards curing disease and doing all sorts of other things that are beneficial to people.
You've already worked with two different people that have won the Nobel Prize. You've had great mentors. What's it like, here at Berkeley, to hang out with a group of people who really think big and want to change what we know?
Jennifer Doudna: Oh, we always have. In fact, the foundational work that we did was done with Emmanuelle Charpentier, and the publication - the first publication about Cas9, and showing how it could be used as a genome editing technology, in 2012 -was published with her and her research lab. So that collaboration was foundational and fundamental, I would say, to developing this technology. But you're right, we've also worked with many others in the field, men and women. I love that about science. I love working with other groups. It makes it fun.
Now you're running one of the most exciting labs in the world. We're sitting here in this building and you have lots of people working in your lab, and it's got computers and hot rooms and cold rooms. What's it like to be in charge of all this brainpower?
Jennifer Doudna: Oh, it's incredible. It's such a privilege to work with people like that, minds like that. That's something I just love about science, thinking about big questions and trying to break them down into something you could eventually actually test in a laboratory. My graduate adviser's question was, "What's the origin of life?" It doesn't get bigger than that, and yet he figured out how to do experiments that get at that question.
What's most exciting about what you're working on now?
Jennifer Doudna: Incredible. It's very exciting. It's a wonderful, wonderful job, a wonderful opportunity that I've had. I could never have imagined that my career would take me to where I am today. Honestly, I really never could have imagined it. I could not have planned for it, but here I am, and I feel so fortunate that I'm at one of the world's best universities. I'm at a public university. We have people coming from all over the world, all kinds of backgrounds, that come to Berkeley because they love knowledge. They want to learn. They want to study. They want to do science. They want to understand the world better. It's a privilege to work with them.

Jennifer Doudna: Well, I'm most excited about two things: One is continuing to understand the fundamental basis for CRISPR-Cas 9 technology and how these molecules work. That's what probably two-thirds of the people working in my research laboratory are doing, is mechanistic dissection of these systems, trying to understand how these molecules do what they do. How do they find and cut particular pieces of DNA or RNA in cells? How does that work?
TIME magazine recently named you one of the 100 "Most Influential People" in the world. What did you think when you saw that?
And the other thing that we're doing is trying to figure out where this is all going in terms of, "How do we deliver these molecules into cells or tissues in a patient?" - for example - or even in a plant. And how do we ensure that when those molecules get into cells or tissues, they make the right kinds of DNA changes and not anything else?
You have an unusual ability to explain very complicated things in a way people can understand. Have people told you that?
Jennifer Doudna: I had to pinch myself. It's a wild thing. I have no idea if that's really true, but I think it was an acknowledgment that the technology of genome editing is profound, and I think it will have a very broad impact across the planet going forward, and that this is really an important moment, not only for the science and the technology but also for the responsibility of it, thinking about how we use it ethically.
As you see it, what are the rewards of a career in research? What motivates you?
Jennifer Doudna: Well, thanks for saying that. I worked at it, and I'm still working at it. It's important to me. I think that it's very important for people to understand science and hopefully capture a little bit of the feeling of excitement that comes out of the research that happens in laboratories and how it affects our lives going forward. I think that's critical.

Jennifer Doudna: Well, people always say, "If you want to make money, go do something else. Don't do academic science." It's not totally true. I mean I've been fine. Even when I was a student, I was always able to save a little bit of money - put a little bit away. But I've always lived, you know, pretty modestly, I guess.
You've won so many awards, and many people think you may soon receive a Nobel Prize. For you, what's the best thing about these awards?
I have to ask myself, "Why do I do what I do? Am I doing it to get rich? Am I doing it to be famous?" And the answer is "No. I'm not." I'm doing it to make discoveries about the natural world. I'm doing it to satisfy my curiosity. If I'm ever doing it for any other reason, I should get out, I think.

Jennifer Doudna: I guess the best thing about them, for me, is that it's a way of saying to students, and to our society, in general, that we value science and that we value scientists. I think that that's one of the things that I've been sad about over my career, so far, is that I've seen kind of a growing distrust of science and scientists, and that makes me sad.

I think that, for me, these prizes are a way of acknowledging the value that all of us get from science, the importance of making fundamental discoveries. And every now and then, as we just discussed, I think that for academic scientists, it's a challenging job. We work very hard. We're not paid like the CEOs of companies, by any stretch.
You're young. So much of your career is still ahead of you. What's next?
I think you have to do this job because you love it. You love the science and you love the students. Every now and then, I think it's nice that prizes are there to sort of say, "Hey, let's step out of the lab for a minute and let's just celebrate the fundamental joy of discovery and the power of science to advance our society."

Jennifer Doudna: What's next? Gosh. I think what I love about science is I don't know what's next, in the broadest sense. What will I be working on five years from now? I literally don't really know. I do think that we, collectively, are at a really interesting moment in biological research, where there is an integration of different technologies, including genome editing, but other kinds of things, too, including computation, artificial intelligence. There's lots of interest in that kind of intersection. I think there's a really exciting opportunity to steer that ship and bring those different kinds of technologies to bear on questions that I think are interesting. And I find that, you know, what are those questions?
Are there other big questions you would love to answer in the decades to come?
I'm certainly continually fascinated by what we - meaning me and my colleagues and collaborators - are finding about the way that microbial life populates the planet, all of the different kinds of genetic pathways that those microbes have. We know there will be new discoveries and technologies that will come from those microbes. I think that's one of the things that we're most excited about focusing on in the lab right now. The other thing is really trying to build the ways that CRISPR tools will be useful both in clinical medicine and in plants. And that really involves ensuring that these molecules can be delivered into cells efficiently, and when they get there, they make the right edit.

Jennifer Doudna: I guess one of the things that I wonder about is - it sort of gets back to the question of the nature of being human and the code of life. The code that we find in all human cells is mostly non-coding. We call it "non-coding DNA," meaning that most of it doesn't encode proteins.

In fact, one of the surprises, when the human genome was first sequenced, was how few genes we find in the human genome. Yet there is an incredible complexity to making a human being and all that we associate with that. So one of the questions that I would love to answer - I don't know if I ever will - but I'd love to know what's essential in human DNA. What parts of it really are critical for the development of a human being?
Why?
And that will be hard to answer, but I think one could certainly imagine doing experiments where you figure out what subset of DNA in a human cell is necessary to make a certain kind of cell, like a liver cell or a brain cell or a lung cell. And also, what are all the other molecules that you need, besides proteins, to do that? I love RNA. So I always want to know what RNA is doing in cells. I think, when I imagine what will I do when I'm sort of a certain age, whatever that age is, and maybe I'm an emeritus professor, and I have a little research operation going on - what would I do? - and that's the kind of thing I'd like to go after, just sort of pie-in-the-sky questions like that.
Have your parents lived to see your achievements?
Jennifer Doudna: Because fundamentally, I'm fascinated by what makes us human. I think it's so interesting to think about that from a chemical sense. What's the chemistry of that, and how do we even ask that question in an experimental setting? I think that would be a great challenge.

Jennifer Doudna: My parents have both died, sadly. My father passed away in 1995, so he never knew about this. My mother passed away a year ago, but she has been in a state where she didn't really know what was going on for a number of years. So she really did not ever know about CRISPR, either. So sadly, neither of my parents knew about it.
What is it about the process of research and experimentation that is a thrill for you? Is it the journey?
However, I kind of feel like they knew me, and they knew my passion for science. I don't think - at some level, they might be surprised or whatever about the details of all of this, but I don't think, knowing me, that they would be surprised that I embraced the opportunity that came my way with this technology - that there was an opportunity to be involved in the discussion about responsible use, to be involved in doing podcasts like this to help teach kids about science and why we do it, and why it's fun, and those sorts of things. So I don't think any of that would surprise them.
When you have success in the lab, you've described it as the feeling of being in a great suspense novel.
Jennifer Doudna: It's the journey. Absolutely. I've always found - and this is true of anything in life, for me, whether I'm on a hike or I'm working in the lab - it's the journey that's the fun part. It's not necessarily getting to the answer or getting to the end of the trail. It's more the process of doing that that's fun. It's the steps along the way, and the things that you figure out, that make it so interesting, things that you couldn't expect, couldn't anticipate.
What are you most proud of when you look at your work?
Jennifer Doudna: Oh, absolutely. It's the feeling that you're onto something. It's probably the feeling that Sherlock Holmes had when he was following clues and trying to figure out a mystery. It's that kind of feeling that you're gathering the information to try to solve this mystery or answer this question that you desperately want to answer.
When you look back at the road you've traveled, from being a little girl in Hawaii to your lab here, how do you see it? Are you surprised? Do you have time to think about it?
Jennifer Doudna: Oh, hands down, I'm most proud of the people that I've trained and the people that have come from my work - I mean from my lab. I think that when I look at these younger people who are now working in their own right, running research laboratories, doing great work, teaching their students, making new discoveries, that's what I'm proudest of. That legacy of science that stemmed from - originally - just me opening up my shop at Yale University back in 1994.

Jennifer Doudna: I think about it occasionally. For me, I sort of feel that when I look at my life, there's sort of my life before CRISPR and after. Before and after, because there was a profound change that happened for me right after the publication of our paper in 2012. I could see it coming then, and looking back on it, I can see even more retrospectively this huge wave of stuff that came to me. Whether it was - everything - the science, the patent fight, the companies that got founded, and learning about all of that, learning how to talk about our science in a way that was more accessible to people who were outside of science.
Well, it's been amazing talking to you. Thank you.
All of that has sort of happened since then. I feel so grateful. I guess that's the thing I feel the most, is gratitude that I would be involved in this and be part of it and have these opportunities. I think of myself as a perpetual student, really. I'm a student. I'm always learning, and these are all areas where I've had just enormous opportunities to learn things that I would have never learned or been exposed to otherwise. So it's been amazing.

Jennifer A. Doudna, Ph.D. Gallery

Jennifer Doudna was born in Washington, D.C., but when she was seven years old, the family moved to Hilo, Hawaii, and Jennifer became fascinated by the exotic plant and animal life she discovered there.

Her mother taught history at a local community college, and her father taught American literature at the University of Hawaii. The family home was full of books. Jennifer's father particularly enjoyed reading about science and natural history. When Jennifer was in the sixth grade, he gave her a copy of The Double Helix by James Watson, who had won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the DNA molecule. She was thrilled by the mystery and drama of scientific research as Watson described it.

Further inspired by her high school chemistry teacher, Jennifer Doudna studied biochemistry at Pomona College in Claremont, California, earning her bachelor's degree in 1985. She undertook graduate studies in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. Her dissertation research there was supervised by the geneticist Jack W. Szostak, who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Doudna's research concerned RNA (ribonucleic acid), a nucleic acid present in the cells of all living things. She focused specifically on ribozymes, molecules of RNA that catalyze biochemical reactions in proteins.

After receiving her doctorate in 1989, she continued her work with Dr. Szostak as a research fellow in molecular biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and in genetics at Harvard Medical School. In her research, Doudna had succeeded in altering the behavior of specific segments of RNA molecules, but further progress was thwarted by the mystery surrounding the actual molecular mechanism of the ribozyme.

In 1991, she moved to Boulder, Colorado, to pursue postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Cech, who had recently won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. In Cech's laboratory, she sought to crystallize molecules of RNA, the better to determine the three-dimensional structure of ribozymes and compare them with that of enzymes, the catalytic proteins. In Boulder, Doudna met a graduate student, Jamie Cate, who shared her research interests. His suggestions proved useful, and the collaboration ripened into a romance.

At the end of her Colorado fellowship in 1994, Doudna accepted an appointment as assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. Jamie Cate moved to New Haven with her, and the two were married.

At Yale, Doudna continued the project she had begun in Colorado, and by 1996, she and her group had succeeded in crystallizing the Tetrahymena group I ribozyme and employing x-ray crystallography to map the three-dimensional structure of its catalytic core. It was the first time the structure of a ribozyme had been revealed to the world. The following year, Doudna was named a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, an appointment that has provided material support for her research ever since.

Having mastered an essential technique, Doudna's group went on to crystallize other ribozymes, including that of the hepatitis delta virus. In 2000, Doudna received the Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation for her achievements and was promoted to full professor at Yale. During the following year, she also served as a visiting professor of chemistry at Harvard.

In 2002, Jennifer Doudna and Jamie Cate were both offered professorships at the University of California, Berkeley. Their son was born the same year, and they have made Berkeley their home ever since. Doudna continued to collect honors for her research; she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003, and to the National Academy of Medicine in 2010.

Meanwhile, Doudna continued her research. She gained access to the synchrotron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for her experiments with high-powered x-ray diffraction. Her work in Berkeley was to lead to her greatest discovery to date.

Doudna's laboratory entered into a long-distance collaboration with Emmanuelle Charpentier, a French biochemist who was working in Sweden at the time. Together, they were investigating the function of Cas9, a protein found in the immune system of Streptococcus bacteria. The Streptococcus immune system functions through "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats" (CRISPR), slicing through the DNA of hostile antibodies to disable them. Doudna, Charpentier, and their colleagues hypothesized that CRISPR-Cas9 could be deployed to edit the genome of living things, including human beings. In 2012, they demonstrated that RNA molecules could be programmed to cut and edit targeted DNA molecules.

Attempts to edit the genome had met with limited success in the past, but CRISPR technology offered the field of genetic science a swift and efficient technique with nearly limitless possibilities, not only for basic research but for the treatment and prevention of genetic disease. With her former student Rachel Haurwitz, Doudna has founded a company, Caribou Biosciences, that is now developing CRISPR technology to address issues such as antimicrobial resistance, food scarcity, and vaccine shortages.

When Doudna and Charpentier made their findings public, the news flew around the world. Along with the promise of preventing incurable genetic diseases, the new technology revived longstanding fears about the possible abuse of genetic research. Some journalists speculated that the new technology would lead to the creation of "designer babies" or misguided attempts to build a "super race." Jennifer Doudna herself was among the first to answer these concerns. In a widely distributed TED talk, she called for an international discussion to develop appropriate regulation of gene editing technology.

In 2014, Jennifer Doudna was the recipient of the Lurie Prize in the Biomedical Sciences from the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health. The following year, she received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and was named one of TIME magazine's "100 Most Influential People." She has since received the Gruber Prize in Genetics, the Canada Gairdner International Award, and the Japan Prize. She was elected a Foreign Member of Britain's Royal Society in 2016. Jennifer Doudna shared her findings - and her concerns - with the general public in her 2017 book, A Crack in Creation.

Jennifer Doudna and her collaborators at Berkeley applied for a patent on their research, but a group at the Harvard-MIT Broad Institute sought a patent for similar work they had carried out independently. Although Doudna and Charpentier published their findings first, the U.S. Patent Office granted the Broad Institute the patent because the Broad researchers claimed to be first to edit genes in cultured human cells. Berkeley filed a lawsuit contesting the decision of the Patent Office.

A 2017 federal court decision favored the Broad Institute's claim, a decision upheld on appeal in 2018, although Berkeley has since received 20 CRISPR patents in the United States. European courts have rejected the Broad Institute's claim, and a resolution of the conflict between the two institutions is anticipated.

Meanwhile, scientists around the world have applied CRISPR to cell biology and a broad spectrum of plant and animal research. Commercial food scientists are employing CRISPR technology to amplify flavors and to create disease-resistant produce. Medical scientists are pursuing treatments for sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Huntington's disease and HIV. Other researchers have extracted blood cells from patients with cancer and blood diseases, edited the cells and returned them the patients with promising results. Editing of cells within the human body is now being tested to treat diseases of the eye and liver.

Because CRISPR technology is comparatively efficient and inexpensive, many see great danger in unregulated experimentation by unaccountable researchers. The United States Food and Drug Administration is prohibited from approving any studies that involve editing the human germline - eggs or sperm - and both China and the European Union are also attempting to block such research. Despite the Chinese ban, in 2019 one unaffiliated researcher in China reported tampering with the genes of a pair of twins in embryo and received criminal penalties including three years' imprisonment and a six-figure fine.

Since 2018, Jennifer Doudna has held the position of senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, in addition to her professorships in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at Berkeley. She directs the Genomics Institute, a joint center of the University of California's Berkeley and San Francisco campuses. At Berkeley, she holds a Chancellor's Professorship in Biomedicine and Health, and is the chair of the Chancellor's Advisor Committee on Biology.

The ongoing research of the renowned Doudna Lab at Berkeley seeks a deeper understanding of all biological processes involving RNA. Doudna's group has learned how the hepatitis C virus synthesizes viral proteins - work that could lead to new antiviral drugs with fewer side effects. Jennifer Doudna has co-founded a number of companies to market CRISPR-related products, including Caribou Biosciences and Mammoth Biosciences. She also serves on the board of pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson.

Jennifer Doudna and her family continue to live in Berkeley. Jamie Cate is a professor at the University of California and works at the nearby Energy Biosciences Institute, with a team pursuing gene editing for the production of biofuels. Jamie and Jennifer's son is also reportedly considering a career in the sciences.

In 2020, Jennifer Doudna and her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It is the first time two female scientists have shared the chemistry prize. In making the award, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted that they have "revolutionized basic science."

Jennifer Doudna had recently arrived at Berkeley to accept a professorship in biochemistry when a colleague drew her attention to unusual bacteria found in an abandoned mine. The property of a single protein, Cas9, found in this microbe, led her to a revolutionary new technique of editing the genome.

Known as CRISPR (for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats"), the technique she demonstrated is many times faster and far more precise than all previously existing methods. Only five years after Doudna first published her findings, researchers all over the world were using CRISPR to explore potential treatments for cancer and diseases of the immune system. The technology also offers the possibility of preventing birth defects and inherited disease, though Doudna herself opposes the concept of so-called "designer babies," or non-therapeutic tinkering with the human genome.

In 2016, Dr. Doudna was awarded the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, endowed by leading Internet entrepreneurs. She has shared the significance of her discoveries with the public in her book A Crack in Creation. In awarding her the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences hailed her for "rewriting the code of life."

Can you remember a moment when you first realized the potential of what you were doing, that it could end certain diseases? What did it feel like?
Jennifer Doudna: I had a wonderful email from a former student in my lab who is now studying for his M.D.-Ph.D., but at the time, he was working in our research lab here at UC Berkeley, and he reminded me of a wonderful day when I was - which, in retrospect, is wonderful. At the time, it was just business as usual.

I was in the lab with a lab member of mine, Martin Jinek, who was the person who was doing work on a protein called Cas9, part of the CRISPR system. We call it CRISPR-Cas9. And we were trying to figure out how it worked. It was pretty clearly an RNA-guided enzyme that could find and cut DNA. And the question was: "How does it do that? Does it do that, and if it does, how does it work?"

He was doing experiments to answer that question. And he eventually figured out that this system could be programmed, literally, with different segments of RNA that have the same sequence of chemical letters that match those letters in DNA. That's what allows it to be programmed to find and cut DNA at a particular place in a cell.

And this student of mine, whose name is Prashant Bhat, reminded me of a day when he came into the lab to do his experiments. He saw me and Martin Jinek leaning over a light box in our lab - which was a way of visualizing the data from one of Martin's experiments - in which we were just looking at each other and high-fiving, and we were just so excited. And why? It was because that was the first experiment where Martin had showed how the system could be programmed, and also how we could simplify it compared to what nature had done.

We turned it into a two-component system, just one type of RNA and one protein that were necessary for this RNA-guided, DNA-cutting reaction to work, this chemistry to happen. And I think, for us, that was really - that precious email from Prashant Bhat reminded me of that - one of those moments that we all live for as scientists, where you make a discovery that you realize is profound in a way. It was much bigger than the experiment began. It's something that could have big implications because of the way it works.
Did you really high-five each other in the lab?
Jennifer Doudna: Well, whether we really did that is probably up for debate. And the reason I say that is because, knowing Martin Jinek, he's a very subdued individual. He's very scholarly, and he would always try to - I would get very excited about things and he would always tell me, "Now, Jennifer, no. We have to wait. I've got to do another control, and I've got to repeat that experiment. Before we get excited, let's make sure."
How do you describe what CRISPR is to the layperson?

Jennifer Doudna: CRISPR is really a fabulous tool for doing surgery on DNA, and it's basically a way to alter the code of life. It's a way to change the DNA sequence in cells so precisely that we can now alter a single letter in the code of a human cell. A human cell has six billion individual letters - three billion base pairs of those letters. We can change a single one with this technology and do other things as well. So I think that this has given scientists a way to rewrite DNA that provides opportunities both for fundamental research to understand what the DNA code is telling us about the way life is, as well as to - in the future - do things that will probably correct disease-causing mutations, create plants that are better adapted to their environments, and many other things.

So let's say we have a book with thousands of words. Basically, now you can go in and take out the misspelled word, or in this case a disease gene.
Jennifer Doudna: That's correct. Yes. The idea is that you can actually correct a disease-causing mutation, even something as small as a single letter that's gone awry.
What are the most exciting applications for this?
Jennifer Doudna: Well, there's many, but I think the ones that are probably closest along include curing sickle cell anemia, which is a disease that involves a single letter that needs to be corrected in a single gene of a human cell, a human red blood cell. That's something that has already been cured in cells growing in laboratories, and also in animal models, and we're now at a point where several groups are about to begin clinical trials in people.
How about all the women that we know that carry a gene that makes them more likely to have breast cancer? Can you edit that out?
Jennifer Doudna: BRCA1, BRCA2, yeah, these are mutations well known to correlate with a high risk for breast and ovarian cancers in women. Right now, it would be difficult to use gene editing to correct that mutation - not because we can't do it in individual cells, but because it would be hard to correct it in every cell of the body. So I think that's, quite frankly, one of the current challenges with the technology, is just delivering it into cells and tissues.

The reason that sickle cell anemia is one of the first targets clinically is because cells can be edited outside the body and then replaced, and that can be done in a way where those cells then take over the blood supply in the person and replace the cells that are defective with cells that are corrected.
Can you tell us about other uses for this amazing tool?

Jennifer Doudna: One of the amazing things about this technology is that it's really opened the door to experiments that scientists are doing in many different kinds of organisms to understand how they work and why they are the way they are. What in their DNA makes wheat susceptible to certain kinds of funguses, or fungi? What is it in people that makes us have certain kinds of properties in our bodies? What in our DNA creates certain traits? I think that is something that maybe most people who are outside of science don't realize, but there's been an enormous uptick in the pace of scientific research that's driven by the power of this technology to allow scientists to ask questions in their laboratories that could never be asked in the past.

In ten years, what do you think this technology might do in terms of everyday life? How many people will it have touched?

Jennifer Doudna: I think many of us will, by then, because I think we'll all be eating food and using crops and plants that will be genome edited. I think that we will be benefiting from medical breakthroughs that will have happened due to genome editing. Whether it's an actual therapy or not, we'll certainly benefit from the biomedical knowledge that's coming from using this technology to understand the cause of disease, for example - and to really kind of start to get at this whole opportunity of personalized medicine that really comes down to, you know, every one of us is a little bit different, based on our DNA. And understanding that, at a molecular level, I think, is coming.

And then, I think, also, we didn't talk about this, but benefiting from other applications of CRISPR, whether it's controlling the spread of mosquito-borne disease, whether it's making chemicals in research laboratories or in commercial settings that are made using bacteria or fungi instead of polluting chemical processes - I think that's also coming with CRISPR, sort of "synthetic biology" is what we call it. So I think, within ten years, probably all of us will have many things that touch our lives that will come from CRISPR.

Could CRISPR be used to treat something like depression, or is that too linked to individual personality?

Jennifer Doudna: Well, that question, to me, really brings up a couple of different but important points. One is that something like depression is not the result of a single gene or even a handful of genes. It's almost certainly the result of hundreds or thousands of genes, as well as the environment that a person has experienced. So it's going to be very complicated to try to - even if we wanted to - to fix it with genome editing, at least the way the technology is right now. And the other thing is - the other point about your question that's so interesting - is that it sort of gets to this question of what makes us human. What makes us unique as individuals? What do we value about the diversity of our life here on Earth? I think that, for many people, the diversity of life is one of the things that makes it so rich and so wonderful. So we wouldn't want to have a way to make us all the same.

It gets into the whole question of eugenics and access. Who decides? Who regulates this? Who makes those decisions? Who pays for it? Who should be allowed to do this? All of these kinds of questions. And again, I want to emphasize that the technology today doesn't allow that yet, but it's close enough that we know we need to be considering those questions.
In your book A Crack in Creation, you wrote that not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about it. That's quite a statement, and you actually were one of the ones who were convening people and saying, "Hold on here, let's look at what we're creating." Did you get pushback from that?
Jennifer Doudna: I would say I didn't get pushback, but definitely, we heard a lot of different opinions about the technology, as you would want, I think, in a conversation. I'm thinking, in particular, about a meeting that I convened with my colleagues in January of 2015, a small meeting up in the Napa Valley. We just had some clinicians, some fundamental researchers. We also had scientists who had been involved in the discussions of ethics of molecular cloning back in the 1970s in attendance. It was really a meeting to start grappling with: We've got this powerful technology of genome editing; it's moving incredibly rapidly in the scientific arena. And yet, none of our government regulators at that time - or many people outside of science - knew anything about it. So it was this weird kind of feeling of sitting on something so powerful and moving so fast, and it could affect many, many people, and yet most of them weren't even aware of it yet.
That meeting in Napa - was there some unintended thing that you learned from gathering those minds up there?
Jennifer Doudna: There was a wonderful comment that was made by a colleague of mine up there.

I remember sitting around a table - about the size of the table in this room - and debating, in particular, about this issue of human embryo editing. Should people do that? Is that something that we should be trying to work towards or work against, or how do we think about that? And a lot of people around the table were talking about all the dangers of doing it and how risky it could be, et cetera, et cetera. And then, at one point, a colleague of mine leaned across the table and said, "Wait a minute. At some point, this technology may be accurate enough that we'll all realize that it would be unethical not to use it that way, to correct the disease-causing mutation for cystic fibrosis or Huntington's disease or things like that." And it made everybody stop and think for a minute and just say, "Wow. We could turn this whole question on its head."

What worries you most about the new technology that you're working on?
Jennifer Doudna: Well, it might surprise you, maybe, but the thing I feel most worried about today is really just - I worry about the pace of this technology outpacing our collective ability to understand the implications of what it does. What I mean by that is that I think that for scientists to race ahead to do things that we can do, but, to coin a phrase from that wonderful line in Jurassic Park by Jeff Goldblum - love it! - "We can do it doesn't mean we should do it." And I think it's really that. It's wanting to make sure that scientists are thinking about the implications of their work, especially with respect to genome editing, prior to just rushing forward.
There are such upsides. You can make a drought-resistant plant and save people from dying of hunger. You might soon hopefully end some cancers. With so much upside, how do you regulate?

Jennifer Doudna: It's a complicated issue because science is global, of course, and people are working in every part of the world now using CRISPR-Cas9 technology, as well as many other technologies. And how do we create a regulatory framework that people will honor in these different jurisdictions? How do we create even a community of scientists where there's kind of a code of ethics that everybody would buy into?

In my view, it really does have to begin with kind of a grassroots effort. It has to begin with scientists coming together and discussing these topics, and I've been involved in convening meetings around this. Fortunately, I think that idea has really spread in the genome editing field to include now people - not just scientists - but also people that are stakeholders, whether they be patients with genetic diseases, or clinicians that hope to use this in the future, or agricultural scientists who want to use it in plants and other types of applications.

So we are seeing a pretty broad cohort of people that are starting to attend these meetings and are interested in the topic. But I think the real challenge ahead is to figure out how to put all of that effort and energy into a cohesive document or consensus kind of opinion piece that people could buy into.

Do scientists agree that we shouldn't have designer babies? That we shouldn't edit the human embryo?
Jennifer Doudna: Oh, certainly they don't agree on that, not at all. I think, for many people, the opportunity to correct a disease-causing mutation at the time of conception rather than having to wait and do it much later is an attractive idea. The difficulty is in thinking about all of the other implications of that kind of genome editing, as well as the technical challenges with it.
When people talk about you, they say that "Dr. Doudna has the golden touch. She knows what to work on." Do you think that's fair?
Jennifer Doudna: That's interesting that you say that, or that people say that.

When I was in graduate school, I worked with a wonderful scientist, Jack Szostak. And that's how I felt about him. I felt like the thing that he had so wonderfully - and it was kind of one of those je ne sais quoi, hard-to-put-your-finger-on-it sorts of traits - is that he had that quality, I felt. He knew the right experiments to do. He knew the right questions to ask.

He didn't know the answers because that's why we do science, but he knew the right ones to ask, and I always thought to myself, "Gosh, if I could bottle that up somehow and figure out what that is." And I never imagined that people would see me that way, but I know I really consciously tried to understand that about the people that I've trained with because I think I have benefited from mentors who were able to do that very beautifully.

I've always been driven by a fascination with evolution. Why is life the way it is now? And, of course, we're seeing life on our planet at a snapshot in time. It was different in the past, and it will be different in the future. And it's all strung together by DNA, right? The code of life is kind of evolving over time. And I've always been very, very interested in that process. So I feel like, if there's a thread to my research over the years, that's kind of always underlying what we do, is thinking about evolution and how it works.

If you had to say what you think your gift is, is it seeing things ahead of time? Is it working with people? There are many smart biochemists, but there's only one you. What do you think is your gift?

Jennifer Doudna: I think that I've always had a knack for experimental science. It's a feeling I have about both the questions that I want to try to answer that I think are important, as well as the way to go about doing that. And I once heard my post-doc advisor, Tom Cech - another very wonderful, celebrated scientist, a Nobel laureate - he once described me as somebody who had a map in her head of experiments that were to be done and could sort of see a whole process. And it was, somehow, when he said that about me, that I kind of realized, "Gosh, I think he's right. That is how my mind works." I hadn't really thought about it before, but I think that is what I would say about me, is that I always have had kind of a talent there of thinking about how I'm going to do experiments, and I still have it. You know, when I meet with people in my lab, I find that, even though, sadly, I'm not in my lab anymore doing actual experiments, I'm still good at thinking about how to do those experiments, which ones are important to do, and how to set them up so that we get data that are going to tell us something meaningful.

That's fascinating. When you wake up in the morning, do you have a vision of a map? What does it look like?

Jennifer Doudna: It's not really visual. It's not something I could draw on a piece of paper. It's more a process, in a way, right? It's almost like a flowchart. It's sort of thinking, "Okay, if we want to figure this out, we could do this, and then this, and then, depending on how that works out, we can do this or this," you know, that kind of thing. It's almost like a flowchart. And there's a logic there. And then I'll think, "Okay, and if we want to do that experiment, I know we need these controls so that we can interpret the data," and then I'll start thinking about how to- logistically - how to get all the pieces to - this person would be good at doing this one thing, this other person over here would be great to help us out with this other thing, that person over there would be a great collaborator because they know how to do something that we don't know how to do. That kind of thing. So I do love team-building and thinking about how do you - if you want to answer a question in the lab, how do you do it? Both, which experiments to do, and also, "How do I bring the right people together to do those experiments?" I love doing that. It's fun.

How do you think growing up in Hawaii affected your work, later in life?
Jennifer Doudna: I loved where I grew up. It was such a magical place in many ways. It was sort of a kid's dream, you know. We had the freedom to run around in the afternoons, and we were definitely checking out our sugarcane fields, snacking on occasional cane stalks, but also exploring guava trees, and running around in the huge tall California grass that grew in the back of our house. It was just a wonderful experience of the native world.
You called it the sleeping grass?
Jennifer Doudna: Sleeping grass, yeah. It would sit there, and when you stepped on it, it'd poke you, but then it would close up, the leaves would close up. It seemed like some kind of interesting chemistry going on there. I wanted to figure that one out.
Do you think you were more curious about the natural world than other kids?
Jennifer Doudna: I didn't think about it, honestly. I felt like one of the neighborhood kids, you know. I played kickball. I liked to play kickball out in the street. I had a horse. I used to ride horseback and ride in 4-H little rodeo events and things like that. So I just had a pretty active outdoor - very outdoor kind of life.
When you were growing up among the sugarcane fields in Hawaii, do you remember some of the first questions you wanted to answer?
Jennifer Doudna: Oh, there were so many. I wondered why sleeping grass closes when you touch it. What's going on? What's the chemistry there? I wondered about, you know, I would walk on lava rock, and I would see all these colors and shapes in the rock, and I would wonder why. Why did lava in one part of the island look so different from lava on other parts of the island? There must be different chemistry going on there. I was always thinking about the chemistry under it. I wanted to know about that, and then, just about the plant life. I mean there were so many fascinating plants growing in Hawaii that I didn't see growing anywhere else, and I always wondered, "Why is that?" So things like that.
Your father taught American literature and your mother taught history. So were books a big deal in your house? How old were you when you read The Double Helix?
Jennifer Doudna: Books were a big deal. We had a lot of those. My dad, his specialty was Henry David Thoreau, so we had multiple copies of Walden around our house and people reading Walden at various dinner tables. That was something that happened quite regularly. My dad also loved reading all kinds of things outside of his specialty, including about science. So one of the really cool things for me, growing, up was that, without even really thinking about it, I got exposed to some really interesting science writers, people like Lewis Thomas - and James Watson with The Double Helix, his book about the discovery of the DNA structure - and books written by medical doctors who were sleuthing the cause of disease in patients. So there were quite a range of things that my dad read or gave to me to read and that we discussed in our house that I think really gave me a sense of what it was like to be a scientist.
And what was interesting about it?
Jennifer Doudna: I think I was in middle school. I was 12 or 13.

Jennifer Doudna: Well, hindsight is always 20/20. People now say, "Well, weren't you struck by Rosalind Franklin's role and how she was maybe treated by these scientists?" Actually, I didn't think about that at the time. Isn't that interesting? I was so captivated by the story of discovering the structure of DNA. I was so amazed by the possibility that you could, as a scientist, ask a question that detailed and figure out the answer. It seemed amazing.
As a junior in high school, you heard a lecture about why cells become cancerous. What effect did that have on you?
I guess, for me, that was the first time that I had a sense of science as a process - you know what I mean? - as a growing, living thing that was created by people rather than, you know, when you're in grade school. You have science textbooks that, at least in my day, were pretty cut-and-dried, and science seemed kind of boring. It seemed like memorizing a lot of facts, and it didn't seem all that interesting to me. But when I read The Double Helix, that was the first time I had the sense of being a sleuth. You're on a trail, you're hunting something down, you're trying to figure something out, and you've got just bits and pieces of data, and you've got to try to put a story together. That was amazing to me.
How old were you?
Jennifer Doudna: In high school, I had - in tenth grade - had a fabulous chemistry class. Miss Wong was our teacher, and she was very good at helping us kids understand the process of doing science - that science is experiments. You ask a question and then you figure out how to answer it in the laboratory. So for me, I became very interested in chemistry, but I knew I liked the living natural world. So those were just nebulous interests of mine at the time. And then, when I heard this lecture by a biochemist talking about her research into why cells become cancerous, it suddenly gelled for me. I realized that's what I want to do: I want to figure out the chemistry of living things. I want to understand the molecules that go awry in a cell that becomes a cancer cell. How does that work?
Was there anything else about Miss Wong that made an impression?
Jennifer Doudna: I was probably 15 at the time, 15 or 16.
Now you've been in a lot of rooms with scientists. How often are you still either the only woman or one of the only women?
Jennifer Doudna: I certainly didn't know any female scientists at that time, except the famous ones - Marie Curie - but I didn't know anybody living that was a female scientist. I just didn't know them. So it seemed really exotic to me to - first of all - see this lecture by a woman scientist, and secondly, to think to myself, "Wow! I wonder if I could do that. I wonder if I could be a scientist." I still remember I had this little chill of thinking,"It would be really weird and wild to become a scientist. I wonder if I could really do that?"

Jennifer Doudna: I think there's been a lot of advances for women - certainly in my area in the biological sciences - over the last few decades. So I feel very fortunate that right now, in my department at the University of California, Berkeley, for example, we have quite a good number of women at all stages of their career, from very senior tenured women to women who are just starting their research.
Do you think women scientists work differently than men do?
But that being said, I find that we still see that in the more senior levels of academic science, as well as all across the business world, there definitely is a lack of women that you see. And I do experience things like - especially business meetings or higher level administrative meetings - where I find that there aren't very many women in the room. Occasionally, I'm the only one.

Jennifer Doudna: There's been a lot written about that. I think there are some trends that I see that are different between the genders. But generally, that's not really how I think about things. I tend to just think of myself primarily, when I'm in a professional setting, as in the context of my work, and what I know about, and what I can contribute to.
You have two sisters: one who's in the arts, one who works for the government, and then you have this great science brain. The same parents, different kids. Since we're talking about genetics, how do you understand these differences?
I think that it is true - or certainly, I've seen in my experience - that I think women tend to not trust themselves as much as maybe they should, not to put themselves forward as much as maybe they should. So I always encourage all students in my lab - but especially women - if I see them maybe doing that, to tell them, "Yes, you are good enough to apply for that job. Yes, you should apply for that fellowship. Yes, please do apply to attend that graduate program. You are good enough to do it." And just to have self-confidence, trust themselves, and to try things, take a risk. I think sometimes women talk themselves out of things when they don't need to.
What about your other interests? What do you do to relax and have fun?
Jennifer Doudna: It's genetics in action! It's hard to say. Yeah, we're all really different in many ways. Not in every way. You can tell we're from the same family in certain ways, but I think that we all have really different interests, and that's something that's made our family fun. I think I saw that in my parents, too. Like, I described my father being a literature professor who was nonetheless very interested in science, and I could see, had he a different lifetime - or there was an alternate universe or something - he could have easily been a scientist, I think.
Do you think these things increase your creativity or help with your work?
Jennifer Doudna: I like gardening. I love playing with plants. I'm a big tomato fan. I grow tomatoes at home. I grow flowers, herbs. So I do a fair amount of that. And also, I'm very much an outdoors enthusiast, so I do a fair amount of hiking, biking, running, things like that. I run 10K races occasionally with my son, and that's fun.
Can you think of an example?
Jennifer Doudna: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I have found that I tend to have my best ideas and creative moments when I'm not in the lab, you know, when I'm doing something else. I'm thinking about something else seemingly, and suddenly, I'll think, "Wait a minute. This would be a really cool thing to do in the lab." And I also find that a lot of times, especially if I've been relaxing a little bit, or just not focusing on work for some period of time - either a little vacation or even just taking a day off of work or spending time on the weekends going for a hike - I'll often find that it's those moments that will stimulate a creative new idea. I'll wake up in the morning thinking about our science, and I'll suddenly think, "Oh wait, there's something really interesting here. We should pursue that."

Jennifer Doudna: I guess, if we go back to the early days for us with CRISPR, even before the molecules that we worked on that are now being used for genome editing, I was actually studying with a couple of my lab members how bacteria fight viral infection using a system known as CRISPR.

In those days, we were studying some of the proteins that are responsible for cutting up the pieces of RNA, which are the chemical labels that these proteins use to find other molecules in bacteria. And it was really - I had gone on a small hike with a couple of my lab members up in - I think we were in Muir Woods, which is - for those folks that know Northern California, you probably know Muir Woods - but if you don't, it's a beautiful redwood forest that was established many decades ago that really has preserved the beauty of redwood trees here in the Northern California area.

So anyhow, we were up there hiking, and in the course of that hike, we were just kind of chitchatting about various things, not necessarily science, but when I got back from that hike, I was talking with one of the students in the lab, Rachel Haurwitz, who is now a very successful CEO of a company that we founded together.
When you focus consciously on a problem, what's that like?
But in that conversation, we talked about some of the work that we were doing in the lab, and I think, for me, that was maybe one of the first moments where I started thinking that the work we were doing could be useful as a technology. I wasn't necessarily thinking about genome editing at that moment, but I was thinking about ways that we could use CRISPR proteins to find pieces of viral DNA and RNA and how we might be able to use that as a research tool. So, for me, that was, in a way, the beginning of really thinking about these CRISPR systems both as a curiosity-driven research project but also as a potential source of new technology.
So when you're talking about literally rewriting the code of life or hopefully eradicating some diseases that afflict millions of people, how do you have a balanced life? Don't you feel like you should be in the lab all the time?
Jennifer Doudna: I kind of get into a zone. I have a desk in my kitchen at home, and that's often where I'll sit. I can look out at my garden, and that's always a source of inspiration, at some level. But I'll often sit there when I'm working or thinking or reading. A lot of times, I'm reading and I'm taking notes and I'm kind of puzzling something out. Sometimes it's just, I'm out weeding my tomato plants and, like I said, suddenly something will come to me, and I'll think, "Ooh!" And then the other thing is that I found that I have to keep a notebook by the side of my bed because it's not uncommon that I'll wake up at some hour of the day or night - early day or late night - and have an idea and think, "Ooh, that's interesting. I want to pursue that." And I'll just jot it down. I'm usually scribbling in the dark. It's like I can't see. I'm just trying to scribble enough that I can read it in the morning and remember the idea.

Jennifer Doudna: Sure. But you know, there's always juggling going on with everything, even at work. In my younger years, I was a real lab rat. I just worked a lot because I wanted to. I just loved it. I love being in the lab. I love the feeling of discovery, but I also had - I'm a realist, too, and students that might be watching this might be thinking, "But science can be so frustrating," and I hear you. It can be.

So I think, for me, it was critical that I had other things to distract me from my frustrations at times at work. I always loved gardening, for example. I've always had a little garden growing wherever I lived. I've always done a lot of hiking and biking, and when I lived in Colorado, I did rollerblading and just getting outdoors and getting away from things that way.

But nowadays, I have to balance my love of work and research in the lab with my son's needs, the fact that I have a husband at home, and a family to spend time with, and I also am responsible for my mother, up until recently. So just things like that. I think it's always about balance.
When you say supportive, what's the key thing that he does?
It's absolutely possible, and I have many friends who are also women, highly successful, have families and they figure it out. I think it helps to have a really supportive partner. That's what I've found. It's incredibly helpful. My husband is the most supportive partner on the planet.
Have you ever felt like you should give your son some very important book, as your father gave you?
Jennifer Doudna: He's a great all-around parent, confidant, fellow scientist, colleague, romantic partner all bundled into one. And so I think, for us, we've always viewed our relationship as, we have our private life and our family and our son, and we also have our science together, and we enjoy both. We kind of wear different hats, even with each other. Also, my husband is very understanding about my - especially now - my crazy schedule, my travel. I travel a lot. So he's the one, more than me, frankly, who is going to the high school meetings with my son, and going to robotics competitions with our son, helping to coach their team, just all of the things that you really need a parent to do.
So many people who are great in math also have some extra ability in music. Do you play music?
Jennifer Doudna: I haven't really done that. Maybe I should. We do read a lot in our house. I brought a book home last night, and I had it sitting on the kitchen table, and my son saw it, and he said, "Oh, what's that, Mom? What's that book?" And it's a novel, but it's written by a young man who - not so young anymore, more like my age - who is Vietnamese, and it's kind of a novel about the Vietnam War. He thought it looked really interesting. So we read all sorts of things in the house. My son actually loves math and he's a bit of a math whiz. So the kinds of books that he tends to read for fun are actually fun books about mathematics. So those are ones that he turns me on to.
What do you think he'll end up doing?
Jennifer Doudna: I think that skipped a generation. My mother played the piano. I tried and it kind of never gelled for me. Now my son is a great piano player and also plays viola, and I asked him recently, "If you somehow didn't pursue science, what else would you do?" and he said, "Oh, I'd be a musician."
It's so hard to predict when these talents or interests will appear or to know where they come from. One of the things that worries people about genetic engineering is the idea that someone will try to use science to create a "super race." Do you think that's a realistic fear?
Jennifer Doudna: I think my son wants to be some kind of an engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, physicist. He loves the physical sciences.
The germline?
Jennifer Doudna: Not really. It's kind of a science fiction-y kind of fear. I think, for many reasons, that's not something that we have to worry about right now or even in the near future. I do think that, you know, making changes to the human germline is coming.
Has anyone done that so far?
Jennifer Doudna: The germline - that means making changes to the DNA that become inheritable. So they change the DNA, not just in an individual, but in their children, and all of their progeny going forward - all of their children's children. So it becomes an inherited trait. That's a profound thing. There's no doubt that this is coming.
At this moment, it's illegal to do that in the United States, isn't it?
Jennifer Doudna: It was announced at a meeting in Hong Kong last November by a scientist who said that he had actually made changes to the germline of two baby girls who were born. I think that announcement catalyzed a lot of the conversations. I think that's really motivating people to move with a bit more speed and focus in terms of understanding the technology today, where it's going, and how we ensure responsible use.
But that's not true in other countries, and that could change in the United States.
Jennifer Doudna: Yeah. It wouldn't be possible to do it for a couple of reasons. One is that federal funding is not available. It cannot be used for any kind of human embryo work - not just genome editing - any kind of human embryo research. And the other is that the Food and Drug Administration that reviews any kind of clinical therapeutics or procedures is not allowed to even review a procedure that would affect human embryos, as we're talking about.
You've compared this in a way to the creation of the atom bomb. Just to give people an idea of the possible applications, and the changes that this technology is bringing, what else could we compare it to?
Jennifer Doudna: Yeah, it could. It could. And in other countries, you're right. They have different types of regulatory structures in other places. So there's no doubt in my mind that that kind of use will happen in the future. It's a question of when, not if.

Jennifer Doudna: We could certainly compare it to the early days of - I would call it modern molecular biology - molecular cloning. This was back in the 1970s, when scientists first began making copies of particular pieces of DNA, being able to clone the insulin gene, for example, to make insulin for people that are diabetic and do that in an industrial setting. That was also revolutionary. It was the birth of companies like Genentech, and now, many, many other biotechnology companies that are creating the therapies that many people are benefiting from today. So it's sort of that. I would say we're sort of at another kind of revolution of that nature, where it's now possible to do things that just a few short years ago scientists didn't have access to.

After Dolly the sheep was created by cloning in the mid-1990s, there was a lot of hysteria. People were afraid someone would start cloning people. Now it's 20 years after Dolly and we haven't seen any cloned people.
A patent's supposed to give legal ownership to the discovery, isn't it?
Jennifer Doudna: Partly. That's probably for many reasons, but partly it's technical, quite honestly. I think cloning people turns out to be very hard. Even cloning more sheep like Dolly is not a trivial thing to do. It's not something that very many people have access to the tools to do or the knowledge to do. And that's where genome editing is a bit different. It's a tool that is widely available. Scientists don't need to be specialists, particularly, to be able to use it, and that's one of the wonders of it. It's a great democratizing tool that has given scientists around the globe the power to alter the code of life in different cellular settings, but it also means that it's much harder to control it.

Jennifer Doudna: Well, what it does is it provides protection for the use of that idea or technology, so that companies - if they want to commercialize that technology, they have some protection to do so and to create things and products and charge money for them, without worrying about competitors immediately stealing their idea. That's sort of the whole goal of the patenting process, is to give opportunities for companies, and for investors in those companies, to be able to trust that if they invest in a company, they can develop something without immediately having competitors able to capture all of that work and make money on it separately from them.
What does "interference" mean, in a legal context?
So what's happening right now with the CRISPR-Cas9 patent situation is that recently the University of California has had a whole series of our patents issuing, and we have quite a large number that are about to be issued. So that's creating a situation where we now have patents at the University of California as well as patents at MIT Broad Institute, and frankly, many, many other institutions. So the U.S. Patent Office is going to have to again sort out what's the primacy of those patents. And we expect that there will be another interference coming that will allow the Patent Office to ask that question in a legal sense.
And billions of dollars are at stake.
Jennifer Doudna: Interference means that you have two patents that make the same claims, some kind of technologies or claims that are overlapping. So then there has to be a resolution of that. If that were to not happen, for some reason, then you have what we have today, which is that the University of California has issued patents, MIT Broad Institute has issued patents, and there's some overlap in the claims of those patents. So anybody wanting to use this technology commercially needs to have a license to both parties' patents. So it's not ideal.
How do you see it playing out?
Jennifer Doudna: I think that's right. If you look at the market capitalization values of companies that are already traded in the public markets, they're in the billions of dollars, collectively, and there are many, many more companies that are using the technology, as well as companies that are getting started that will build value over time.
Has the patent fight turned nastier than you thought?
Jennifer Doudna: I think there are different scenarios for how it could play out. It's not clear yet. I think, if this interference is declared, then that will provide a legal platform for figuring out, really, who invented this technology and who should have the primary patents to it. If that doesn't happen, then it will be sorted out probably with lawsuits in the courts eventually.
If you fixed or improved the patent system, what would you do?
Jennifer Doudna: Is the patent fight nastier than I thought? Yes. I think that's been one of the worst parts of this whole experience for me, honestly. Yeah. I couldn't have prepared for it, and I've tried to view it as part of my education. And sometimes education's painful. Sometimes the way you learn things in life is through pain. This is one of them for me. It just is. But I try to view it as part of my education. It's part about learning about people and their behavior, learning about the patenting process itself, and why do we do it, and how does it work. And in many ways, I feel it's sort of broken, but this is the system that we have and we have to work with it. There also are occasional glimmers of light. I guess I was incredibly happy that my university has stuck up for me. They have. They could have let me just drift away. They could have just turned their back, and they didn't, and that means a lot to me.

Jennifer Doudna: Well, I would find a way to protect ideas in a way that would enable them more. I guess I'm particularly referring to technologies like CRISPR that are, frankly, so enabling to so many people that it's actually not a good idea to squirrel them away. You really want to get them into as many people's hands as possible and let them take over the creative process with that tool. Use the tool - whether it's a hammer or a gene editing molecule - use it to do creative things. Build the house or build the cell and make those products. And to have a system that inhibits that somehow, with a foundational technology like that, it's not a good idea.
There's all this competition involved in the patent process now, but didn't your initial work on CRISPR-Cas9 stem from collaboration? Weren't you working with scientists from another institution?
How would I do it differently? It's very hard to say. How can I come up with a better system? I ask myself that occasionally, and I don't have a good answer, but I do think that we do need to collectively come up with a system that will make technologies like this - and there are others, of course, and there will be ones in the future - make those widely available, so that they can be advanced as quickly as possible towards curing disease and doing all sorts of other things that are beneficial to people.
You've already worked with two different people that have won the Nobel Prize. You've had great mentors. What's it like, here at Berkeley, to hang out with a group of people who really think big and want to change what we know?
Jennifer Doudna: Oh, we always have. In fact, the foundational work that we did was done with Emmanuelle Charpentier, and the publication - the first publication about Cas9, and showing how it could be used as a genome editing technology, in 2012 -was published with her and her research lab. So that collaboration was foundational and fundamental, I would say, to developing this technology. But you're right, we've also worked with many others in the field, men and women. I love that about science. I love working with other groups. It makes it fun.
Now you're running one of the most exciting labs in the world. We're sitting here in this building and you have lots of people working in your lab, and it's got computers and hot rooms and cold rooms. What's it like to be in charge of all this brainpower?
Jennifer Doudna: Oh, it's incredible. It's such a privilege to work with people like that, minds like that. That's something I just love about science, thinking about big questions and trying to break them down into something you could eventually actually test in a laboratory. My graduate adviser's question was, "What's the origin of life?" It doesn't get bigger than that, and yet he figured out how to do experiments that get at that question.
What's most exciting about what you're working on now?
Jennifer Doudna: Incredible. It's very exciting. It's a wonderful, wonderful job, a wonderful opportunity that I've had. I could never have imagined that my career would take me to where I am today. Honestly, I really never could have imagined it. I could not have planned for it, but here I am, and I feel so fortunate that I'm at one of the world's best universities. I'm at a public university. We have people coming from all over the world, all kinds of backgrounds, that come to Berkeley because they love knowledge. They want to learn. They want to study. They want to do science. They want to understand the world better. It's a privilege to work with them.

Jennifer Doudna: Well, I'm most excited about two things: One is continuing to understand the fundamental basis for CRISPR-Cas 9 technology and how these molecules work. That's what probably two-thirds of the people working in my research laboratory are doing, is mechanistic dissection of these systems, trying to understand how these molecules do what they do. How do they find and cut particular pieces of DNA or RNA in cells? How does that work?
TIME magazine recently named you one of the 100 "Most Influential People" in the world. What did you think when you saw that?
And the other thing that we're doing is trying to figure out where this is all going in terms of, "How do we deliver these molecules into cells or tissues in a patient?" - for example - or even in a plant. And how do we ensure that when those molecules get into cells or tissues, they make the right kinds of DNA changes and not anything else?
You have an unusual ability to explain very complicated things in a way people can understand. Have people told you that?
Jennifer Doudna: I had to pinch myself. It's a wild thing. I have no idea if that's really true, but I think it was an acknowledgment that the technology of genome editing is profound, and I think it will have a very broad impact across the planet going forward, and that this is really an important moment, not only for the science and the technology but also for the responsibility of it, thinking about how we use it ethically.
As you see it, what are the rewards of a career in research? What motivates you?
Jennifer Doudna: Well, thanks for saying that. I worked at it, and I'm still working at it. It's important to me. I think that it's very important for people to understand science and hopefully capture a little bit of the feeling of excitement that comes out of the research that happens in laboratories and how it affects our lives going forward. I think that's critical.

Jennifer Doudna: Well, people always say, "If you want to make money, go do something else. Don't do academic science." It's not totally true. I mean I've been fine. Even when I was a student, I was always able to save a little bit of money - put a little bit away. But I've always lived, you know, pretty modestly, I guess.
You've won so many awards, and many people think you may soon receive a Nobel Prize. For you, what's the best thing about these awards?
I have to ask myself, "Why do I do what I do? Am I doing it to get rich? Am I doing it to be famous?" And the answer is "No. I'm not." I'm doing it to make discoveries about the natural world. I'm doing it to satisfy my curiosity. If I'm ever doing it for any other reason, I should get out, I think.

Jennifer Doudna: I guess the best thing about them, for me, is that it's a way of saying to students, and to our society, in general, that we value science and that we value scientists. I think that that's one of the things that I've been sad about over my career, so far, is that I've seen kind of a growing distrust of science and scientists, and that makes me sad.

I think that, for me, these prizes are a way of acknowledging the value that all of us get from science, the importance of making fundamental discoveries. And every now and then, as we just discussed, I think that for academic scientists, it's a challenging job. We work very hard. We're not paid like the CEOs of companies, by any stretch.
You're young. So much of your career is still ahead of you. What's next?
I think you have to do this job because you love it. You love the science and you love the students. Every now and then, I think it's nice that prizes are there to sort of say, "Hey, let's step out of the lab for a minute and let's just celebrate the fundamental joy of discovery and the power of science to advance our society."

Jennifer Doudna: What's next? Gosh. I think what I love about science is I don't know what's next, in the broadest sense. What will I be working on five years from now? I literally don't really know. I do think that we, collectively, are at a really interesting moment in biological research, where there is an integration of different technologies, including genome editing, but other kinds of things, too, including computation, artificial intelligence. There's lots of interest in that kind of intersection. I think there's a really exciting opportunity to steer that ship and bring those different kinds of technologies to bear on questions that I think are interesting. And I find that, you know, what are those questions?
Are there other big questions you would love to answer in the decades to come?
I'm certainly continually fascinated by what we - meaning me and my colleagues and collaborators - are finding about the way that microbial life populates the planet, all of the different kinds of genetic pathways that those microbes have. We know there will be new discoveries and technologies that will come from those microbes. I think that's one of the things that we're most excited about focusing on in the lab right now. The other thing is really trying to build the ways that CRISPR tools will be useful both in clinical medicine and in plants. And that really involves ensuring that these molecules can be delivered into cells efficiently, and when they get there, they make the right edit.

Jennifer Doudna: I guess one of the things that I wonder about is - it sort of gets back to the question of the nature of being human and the code of life. The code that we find in all human cells is mostly non-coding. We call it "non-coding DNA," meaning that most of it doesn't encode proteins.

In fact, one of the surprises, when the human genome was first sequenced, was how few genes we find in the human genome. Yet there is an incredible complexity to making a human being and all that we associate with that. So one of the questions that I would love to answer - I don't know if I ever will - but I'd love to know what's essential in human DNA. What parts of it really are critical for the development of a human being?
Why?
And that will be hard to answer, but I think one could certainly imagine doing experiments where you figure out what subset of DNA in a human cell is necessary to make a certain kind of cell, like a liver cell or a brain cell or a lung cell. And also, what are all the other molecules that you need, besides proteins, to do that? I love RNA. So I always want to know what RNA is doing in cells. I think, when I imagine what will I do when I'm sort of a certain age, whatever that age is, and maybe I'm an emeritus professor, and I have a little research operation going on - what would I do? - and that's the kind of thing I'd like to go after, just sort of pie-in-the-sky questions like that.
Have your parents lived to see your achievements?
Jennifer Doudna: Because fundamentally, I'm fascinated by what makes us human. I think it's so interesting to think about that from a chemical sense. What's the chemistry of that, and how do we even ask that question in an experimental setting? I think that would be a great challenge.

Jennifer Doudna: My parents have both died, sadly. My father passed away in 1995, so he never knew about this. My mother passed away a year ago, but she has been in a state where she didn't really know what was going on for a number of years. So she really did not ever know about CRISPR, either. So sadly, neither of my parents knew about it.
What is it about the process of research and experimentation that is a thrill for you? Is it the journey?
However, I kind of feel like they knew me, and they knew my passion for science. I don't think - at some level, they might be surprised or whatever about the details of all of this, but I don't think, knowing me, that they would be surprised that I embraced the opportunity that came my way with this technology - that there was an opportunity to be involved in the discussion about responsible use, to be involved in doing podcasts like this to help teach kids about science and why we do it, and why it's fun, and those sorts of things. So I don't think any of that would surprise them.
When you have success in the lab, you've described it as the feeling of being in a great suspense novel.
Jennifer Doudna: It's the journey. Absolutely. I've always found - and this is true of anything in life, for me, whether I'm on a hike or I'm working in the lab - it's the journey that's the fun part. It's not necessarily getting to the answer or getting to the end of the trail. It's more the process of doing that that's fun. It's the steps along the way, and the things that you figure out, that make it so interesting, things that you couldn't expect, couldn't anticipate.
What are you most proud of when you look at your work?
Jennifer Doudna: Oh, absolutely. It's the feeling that you're onto something. It's probably the feeling that Sherlock Holmes had when he was following clues and trying to figure out a mystery. It's that kind of feeling that you're gathering the information to try to solve this mystery or answer this question that you desperately want to answer.
When you look back at the road you've traveled, from being a little girl in Hawaii to your lab here, how do you see it? Are you surprised? Do you have time to think about it?
Jennifer Doudna: Oh, hands down, I'm most proud of the people that I've trained and the people that have come from my work - I mean from my lab. I think that when I look at these younger people who are now working in their own right, running research laboratories, doing great work, teaching their students, making new discoveries, that's what I'm proudest of. That legacy of science that stemmed from - originally - just me opening up my shop at Yale University back in 1994.

Jennifer Doudna: I think about it occasionally. For me, I sort of feel that when I look at my life, there's sort of my life before CRISPR and after. Before and after, because there was a profound change that happened for me right after the publication of our paper in 2012. I could see it coming then, and looking back on it, I can see even more retrospectively this huge wave of stuff that came to me. Whether it was - everything - the science, the patent fight, the companies that got founded, and learning about all of that, learning how to talk about our science in a way that was more accessible to people who were outside of science.
Well, it's been amazing talking to you. Thank you.
All of that has sort of happened since then. I feel so grateful. I guess that's the thing I feel the most, is gratitude that I would be involved in this and be part of it and have these opportunities. I think of myself as a perpetual student, really. I'm a student. I'm always learning, and these are all areas where I've had just enormous opportunities to learn things that I would have never learned or been exposed to otherwise. So it's been amazing.

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Jennifer A. Doudna, Ph.D. | Academy of Achievement

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Jennifer Doudna had recently arrived at Berkeley to accept a professorship in biochemistry when a colleague drew her attention to unusual bacteria found in an abandoned mine. The property of a single protein, Cas9, found in this microbe, led her to a revolutionary new technique of editing the genome.

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https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-names-headquarters-after-hidden-figure-mary-w-jackson

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As a young girl, Olivia Juliette Hooker '62 (PhD) witnessed one of the most violent and deadly riots in United States history, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. It left as many as 300 dead, more than 1,000 homes and businesses destroyed, and 10,000 people homeless in Greenwood, Oklahoma, a once-prosperous area known as "The Black Wall Street."

The images of hatred and injustice never left Hooker. Throughout her lifetime, Hooker led efforts to gain recognition and restitution for those who lost their loved ones, homes, and livelihoods in the massacre.

After losing their family department store in the riot, the Hooker family fled Tulsa and settled in Columbus, Ohio, with next to nothing.

Determined to rise above her circumstances, Hooker went on to achieve a bachelor's degree in education from Ohio State University. She then taught and encouraged third graders in Columbus for several years.

"If you dwell on your misery, you're not helping yourself or anybody else. So, if you think, 'What can I do to keep this from happening again?' that helps you go forward, rather than spending your life pitying yourself."

-Olivia Hooker

In World War II, Hooker hoped to serve her country despite her early disillusionment. However, the US Navy refused to enlist a woman of color.

Hooker did not give up. Instead, she enlisted with the US Coast Guard, becoming the first African American woman to serve in active duty.

After the war, Hooker attended graduate school on the GI Bill, achieving a master's degree from Columbia University and, in 1961, a doctorate in psychology from the University of Rochester.

As a teacher, mentor, and clinician, Hooker devoted the rest of her life to helping people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She cited fairness and an open mind as keys to her success.

"It's not about you, or me, but it's about what we can give to this world."

-Olivia Hooker

Hooker turned lives around at the Albion Correctional Facility for women in Albion, New York. She offered therapy and support to children with learning disabilities as a director at the Kennedy Child Study Center in New York City. And, she inspired and mentored students of color for 22 years as a senior clinical lecturer and an APA Honors Professor at Fordham University.

Even after her retirement in 1963, Hooker continued to help children with developmental disabilities at the Fred Keller School for Behavioral Analysis until the age of 87.

In October 2019, the US Coast Guard announced the commission of their 61st Sentinel Class, fast-response cutter, the USCGC Olivia Hooker.

As President Barack Obama pointed out in his address at the 134th Commencement of the Coast Guard Academy, Hooker was "a tireless voice for justice and equality." Indeed, she embodied the US Coast Guard motto, Semper Paratus (Always Ready).

Awards and Honors

American Psychological Association Presidential Citation

New York State Senate Veterans' Hall of Fame inductee

The Olivia Hooker Dining Facility, Staten Island Coast Guard Facility, named in her honor

Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Zukunft dedicated a training center within Coast Guard Headquarters named in her honor

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Olivia Hooker (1915-2018) | Celebration 2020 | University of Rochester

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As a young girl, Olivia Juliette Hooker '62 (PhD) witnessed one of the most violent and deadly riots in United States history, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. It left as many as 300 dead, more than 1,000 homes and businesses destroyed, and 10,000 people homeless in Greenwood, Oklahoma, a once-prosperous area known as "The Black Wall Street."

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ladys West knew from a young age that she didn't want to be a farmer. But the mathematician, born in 1930 in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, still had to help harvest crops on her family's small farm. The hard work started before daybreak and lasted well into the blistering heat of the afternoon. She hated the dirt but, while she worked, she kept her mind on the building behind the trees at the end of the farm. It was her school, and even then she knew it would be her ticket to freedom.

"I was gonna get an education and I was going to get out of there. I wasn't going to be stuck there all my life," West, 89, says firmly, on Zoom in her home in Virginia.

What she could not have guessed was that this focus would shatter the perceptions of black women of the time and even lead to the invention of one of our most widely used inventions - GPS, the global positioning system.

The red schoolhouse, as West's elementary school was known, was a three-mile walk away, through the woods and over streams. The seven year groups, who were all black, were taught in one room, but West quickly stood out.

Her parents tried to save some money to send her to college, but unexpected bills kept hitting the fund. If West was going to go to college, she needed to find a way to pay for it herself. She tried to put money aside, but became frustrated at how little progress she was making. Then a teacher announced that the state was going to give a college scholarship to the two top students from her year. It was her golden opportunity.

"I started doing everything so that I would be at the top," West says. "And sure enough, when I graduated from high school, I got one." The scholarship allowed West to attend Virginia State College, a historically black university.

She didn't have much time to celebrate. While her tuition was paid, she needed money for room and board. Her parents could help for the first year, but she would need to find funding for the others. She confided in her maths teacher who, after seeing her potential, offered her a part-time job babysitting.

She quickly learned that, while she had been the best in her rural school, she had to put in work to keep up with students from bigger cities. "I was so dedicated that I didn't care about missing the fun. But now I look back and I should have," she says before laughing.

She decided to major in mathematics because it was a well-respected subject. It was largely studied by men, but she didn't take much notice of them. "I knew deep in my heart that nothing was getting in my way."

After graduating, she became a teacher, saving money for graduate school. She returned to the university a few years later and earned a master's in mathematics. She briefly took on another teaching position after graduating. Then she was offered a job at a naval base in Dahlgren, Virginia. This made her only the second black woman to be hired to work as a programmer at the base. And she was one of only four black employees.

West at work in the Dahlgren naval base in 1981.

When she started her job, the navy was bringing in computers. She was hired to do programming and coding for the huge machines. She felt proud that she got the job, but knew the hard work had just begun. Despite her intellectual abilities and career success, West had long wrestled with the feeling that she was inferior. It was this feeling, deeply ingrained and felt, she thinks, by many African Americans, that drove her to work as hard as she could.

She still remembers her first day. The military base was grey, and people were mingling before starting work, laughing and drinking coffee. She met the man who would become her husband, Ira West - but refused to be distracted and at first largely ignored him. "I just got there and I was a serious woman. I didn't have time to be playing around," she says.

Her white colleagues were friendly and respectful, but initially didn't socialise with her outside the office - something she tried not to let get to her. "You know how you know that kind of thing is going on, but you won't let it take advantage of you? I started to think to myself that I'll be a role model as the black me, as West, to be the best I can be, doing my work and getting recognition for my work," she says.

The naval base was its own world, so it felt isolating at times. While West's office was not racially segregated, a fierce civil-rights battle was unfolding across the country, particularly in the south, partly focusing on segregation. Outside the base, there were sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and places of transport. Her friends from college were deeply involved. West and her husband"supported what they were doing ... and kept our eyes on what was developing".

West was conflicted. She supported the peaceful protests, but was told that she couldn't participate because of her government work. So she decided to focus on a quieter revolution, one she could continue inside the base. She visited the demonstrations and came back determined to commit herself to her work. She hoped that, by doing it to the best of her ability, she could chip away at the stigma black people faced. "They hadn't worked with us, they don't know [black people] except to work in the homes and yards, and so you gotta show them who you really are," she explains. "We tried to do our part by being a role model as a black person: be respectful, do your work and contribute while all this is going on."

West did just that. She quickly climbed the ranks and gained the admiration and respect of her colleagues. The work was hard and she had to deal with large datasets. "You had to be particular. You can learn the process, but then you have to really make sure you create the process just right, so everything would come out all right," she says.

At the house that she and her husband built between 1976 and 1979.

In the early 60s, West took part in an award-winning study that proved "the regularity of Pluto's motion relative to Neptune", according to a 2018 press release by the US air force. In 1979, she received a commendation for her hard work from her departmental head. She then became project manager for the Seasat radar altimetry project; Seasat was the first satellite that could monitor the oceans. She oversaw a team of five people. She programmed an IBM 7030 Stretch computer, which was significantly faster than other machines at the time, to provide calculations for an accurate geodetic Earth model. This detailed mathematical model of the shape of the Earth was a building block for what would become the GPS orbit.

While her team laid the groundwork for GPS, West took every opportunity the base gave her. She went to classes in the evening and gained another master's degree in public administration, this time from the University of Oklahoma.

In 1998, aged 68, after spending more than four decades at the base, West knew it was time to retire, but she was terrified at the thought of not working. So after retirement she intended to focus on her PhD. But then she had a stroke.

"I was just sitting there working on the computer and all of a sudden I started spinning around," West says. As soon as she left hospital, she started working on her recovery. "I never stopped one moment just to feel sorry for myself and say: 'Oh boy, I'd never make it.' I just said: 'What's next?'"

She would eventually finish her dissertation and gain her PhD in public administration and policy affairs in 2000 at the age of 70.

Looking back, West says she didn't know she was revolutionising technology across the world. "You never think that anything you are doing militarily is going to be that exciting. We never thought about it being transferred to civilian life, so that was a pleasant surprise."

West's contributions went unrecognised not just by herself, but others too. Her 42-year career at the navy base was largely unremarked. But years later, she sent a short autobiography to a sorority function. To her surprise, her sorority sisters were blown away. "I just thought it was my work, and we'd never talk to our friends about work. I just never thought about it. I didn't brag about what I was working on," West says. "But to see other people so excited about it, that was amazing."

With her husband, Ira.

Her sorority sisters weren't the only ones that were excited. West soon started to get recognition as one of the "hidden figures" for her contribution to the development of GPS. In 2018, West was inducted into the US air force hall of fame. Her work has at last been written into history. She knows it's a feat that is rare for black women.

"We always get pushed to the back because we are not usually the ones that are writing the book of the past. It was always them writing and they wrote about people they thought were acceptable. And now we're getting a little bit more desire to pull up everyone else that's made a difference."

When West watched the film Hidden Figures, a drama about a trio of African American female mathematicians working for Nasa, she finally felt seen. "I really loved the movie and I didn't know that that was going on with them. But they were doing something similar," she says. It made her realise there were probably many hidden groups of black women making important scientific contributions across the world.

"I felt proud of myself as a woman, knowing that I can do what I can do. But as a black woman, that's another level where you have to prove to a society that hasn't accepted you for what you are. What I did was keep trying to prove that I was as good as you are," she said. "There is no difference in the work we can do."

She is appreciative of all the protesters that have come together in recent months to march for Black Lives Matter. "I'm hoping that, from that, we become better people, closer to the reality of who we really are, and the world becomes more united than it is now," West says.

She hopes the call for justice on the street translates into concrete proposals that support more women and black people in science and mathematics. She wants more to be done to encourage underrepresented groups through scholarships and tailored training programmes.

But while West is incredibly proud of the work she did in helping develop GPS, she doesn't use it herself - preferring to stick to paper maps. "I'm a doer, hands-on kind of person. If I can see the road and see where it turns and see where it went, I am more sure."

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Gladys West: the hidden figure who helped invent GPS

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ladys West knew from a young age that she didn't want to be a farmer. But the mathematician, born in 1930 in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, still had to help harvest crops on her family's small farm. The hard work started before daybreak and lasted well into the blistering heat of the afternoon.

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https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography - Amelia

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Marie Maynard Daly is the first African American woman to receive a doctoral degree

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Biography LINK

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Carolyn Parker was the first African-American Woman known to gain postgraduate degree in physics.  - Maya K.

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Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist, author, and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. - Gabe F.

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https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/beth-a-brown-1969-2008/

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by Jacob P.

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British chemist Rosalind Franklin is best known for her role in the discovery of the structure of DNA, and for her pioneering use of X-ray diffraction.

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This trailblazing engineer became the first person in history to design a Naval ship using a computer.

Raye Montague, the groundbreaking engineer and ship designer, smashed both gender and racial barriers to revolutionize Naval ship design and become the U.S. Navy's first female program manager of ships. While Montague was the first person to ever design a ship on a computer, her contributions were little known until Margot Lee Shetterly's book Hidden Figures, which told the story of African American female mathematicians at NASA, generated a new interest in other little-known women who made remarkable contributions with their technical prowess. Montague, who died in late 2018 and whose story has been told in a new picture book, The Girl With A Mind For Math, always credited her mother's insistence on education for giving her the push she needed to reach for her dreams. "You'll have three strikes against you," she remembered her saying. "You're female, you're black and you'll have a Southern segregated school education. But you can be or do anything you want, provided you're educated."

Montague was born on January 21, 1935 in Arkansas, and the gifted girl, who excelled at math and science, set her sights on her future career early: when her grandfather took the 7-year-old Montague to see a captured German submarine during WWII, she was fascinated by how it worked. "I looked through the periscope and saw all these dials and mechanisms. And I said to the guy, 'What do you have to know to do this?'" she recalled later. "He said, 'Oh, you'd have to be an engineer, but you don't have to worry about that.'" For a while, it seemed that he was right: when she graduated high school, she wasn't permitted to study engineering at the University of Arkansas because the engineering program didn't admit black students. Instead, she completed a degree in business and moved to Washington D.C. in 1956 to become a typist for the Navy. She continued to pursue her dream of becoming an engineer by taking night classes in computer programming and engineering.

Montague's job with the Navy seated her next to the department's UNIVAC I computer, where she learned how it worked by watching the male Ivy League graduates running the computer. At first, as she later recounted, Montague wasn't allowed to use the computer "because 'we' weren't supposed to touch that computer right? And because I was from Arkansas." One day when the engineers were all out sick, however, she proved that she was up for the challenge by running the machine by herself. Her boss grudgingly agreed to give her a promotion to work on engineering projects - if she worked the night shift. But there was no public transportation at night, and Montague couldn't drive. So she bought a 1949 Pontiac, taught herself how to drive, and worked nights until she got the promotion. Soon, she was appointed a computer systems analyst, and she continued to excel, despite many obstacles along the way.

The real test of Montague's mettle came in 1971 when she was given the daunting task of figuring out how to design a Naval ship using a computer - her boss didn't mention that his department had been unsuccessfully trying to accomplish this task for years. She ended up having to tear down the Navy's computer and rebuild it but, after months of work, she figured out how to create computer-generated ship designs.

After she proved it was possible, the admiralty asked her to create a rough draft for an actual ship. It normally took two years to produce a design of a ship on paper; they gave her a month and she finished the design in 18 hours and 56 minutes. In honor of her breakthrough in the ship design process, Montague was awarded the Navy's Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1972.

Montague continued to climb the Navy's civilian ladder, becoming the program director for the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) Integrated Design, Manufacturing, and Maintenance Program, the division head for the Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) Program, and deputy program manager of the Navy's Information Systems Improvement Program. She eventually earned the civilian equivalent rank of captain.

When Montague retired in 1990, her contributions were largely forgotten, but with the success of Hidden Figures, her name emerged as another example of an African American woman in technology whose work was critical to her country's success. She has since been recognized by the Navy and inducted into the Arkansas Women's Hall of Fame. She used her fame to tell people her story and urge them to persevere in their dreams: "Don't let people control you, you control the situation," Montague said in an interview in 2018. "Change obstacles into challenges. You might have to step back and go a different direction, but you can achieve."

Books About Little-Known Women in Programming & Math

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Raye Montague: The "Hidden Figure" Who Revolutionized Naval Ship Design

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This trailblazing engineer became the first person in history to design a Naval ship using a computer. Raye Montague, the groundbreaking engineer and ship designer, smashed both gender and racial barriers to revolutionize Naval ship design and become the U.S. Navy's first female program manager of ships.

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She is an American scientist and inventor. She invented the illusion transmitter in 1980. She was responsible for developing the digital media formats image processing systems.

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REVOLT.TV is home to exclusive interviews from rising stars to the biggest entertainers and public figures of today. Here is where you get the never-before-heard stories about what's really happening in the culture from the people who are pushing it forward.
When Chance The Rapper tweeted about Valerie L. Thomas, the woman he claimed invented 3D TV and movies, many were stunned that they never heard of her. Though this claim isn't quite accurate, what is true is that Thomas' contributions to science were indeed revolutionary. She is credited with inventing the illusion transmitter, the first mechanism to create the appearance of a 3D image using concave mirrors and rays of light. She received a patent for this in 1980.
When did you discover that you had a knack for math and science?
Thomas's career began at NASA in 1964, when she was first hired as a mathematician/data analyst. After being looked out for by a woman in her branch and transferred away from her original supervisor, she began working on Quick Look Processors for the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory (OGO). And in 1970, she started working on "Landsat," the first satellite to ever send images from space to be used by scientists to study the earth's resources.
And that sense of curiosity carried you all the way to Morgan State University where majored in physics, is that right?
To this very day, Thomas is devoted to passing her knowledge and love of learning onto future generations. Here's what she had to say about her life and legacy in her exclusive chat with REVOLT. Read below.

I can't describe when I discovered that I like science and math. However, my father was into photography. I was a curious child. During that time, photography was [produced] with chemicals. My father put a red light bulb in the kitchen, so the whole kitchen would be sort of dark but have a red tinge to it. Once he processed the film, got the negatives, we would go upstairs in the hallway, and he would put the negatives in his enlarger to make different size photographs. That was my first introduction to optics. My father was also into electronics, and I would watch that, too. Seeing the mechanical parts inside the TV, I wondered how the mechanical parts created the images on the TV screen.

Yes, I really wanted to learn about electronics but since that did not happen, I decided that with a physics major I could learn about "what makes things tick." Throughout my K-12 school days, I did not study, but when I got my first C in junior high and cried all the way home from school, I decided to make a choice. I could continue not studying and take the grades I would get or I could start studying and ensure that I would continue to get all good grades. Did I want to study or did I want to develop my social side? My decision was to develop my social side. So, I understood within myself that once I made that decision, I could not complain if things did not go my way in terms of grades. I had to accept the consequences.
After graduating from Morgan State, how did you get a job at NASA?
So, when I went to class, I focused on learning and understanding. I made sure that I was well rested, and sat up front so that I could see the board and the teacher could see me. If I didn't understand, I raised my hand and asked questions. It worked. I took on that responsibility, and decided not to focus on grades but on learning. It took me successfully all the way through to college.
What it was like being a Black woman working for NASA during the Jim Crow era?
When I got to Morgan State, I found out on the first day in my physics class that I had to be able to handle Calculus in my second year. I did not know what Calculus was. So, I learned how to study and worked hard to catch up.

When I was in my senior year of college, recruiters would come to the school and students would sign up to meet with recruiters. So, I signed up to meet with the recruiters, and most of the recruiters that I went to talk with were from private industry. Only one was from the government, and that was NASA. I would tell them that I was planning on going to graduate school, so none of the corporate recruiters called me back. By the time that NASA got back to me, I realized that I did not have money to go to graduate school and I needed to find a job. The NASA recruiter asked me when did I want to start work. And I told him, Monday after graduation. He said, "Don't you want to take a vacation first?" I did not have money to take a vacation, so I said, "The second Monday after graduation." That's when I started.

It just so happened that where I was in the organization, much to my surprise, there were quite a few African Americans. When you hear about Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson, and you see things written up about them being human computers, you probably also see another name: Melba Roy. She worked in the organization that I worked in when I first got hired at NASA. She and a couple of others, including a woman who used to frequently check on me, were well respected in the organization. They were high level African American women in the organization. And I never asked, but my guess is that Melba probably was very instrumental in getting more African Americans in that organization. So, I was not in a typical situation in terms of not having many African Americans around. That was sort of unique.

When I first started, to me, it was like going from one college campus to another college campus. I was in a large office that included people who had been there for awhile, and recent graduates. One of the things I noticed was that the other students had an assignment to work on and I did not. But, it did not bother me because it was like I was in college. I just socialized by getting to know people and learning about my new environment. Now, there was a woman who used to check on me frequently. She would check to see how I was doing, and ask me if I had been given an assignment. When I said, "No," she would say, "I'm going to talk to the person who was supposed to be my supervisor." When she came back later and asked, "Did he come and talk to you, and give you an assignment?" I said, "No." She would check with him again and then check with me. This went on for awhile.

He finally gave me a write up, and I guess he wanted me to write a program. I did not know what a program was. I had never seen a computer before except in science fiction movies. Not only that, but the operating system that the branch was using was something that was developed by the branch head. It was not a typical operating system; however, it was perfect for the kind of work that they did in the branch. I got instructions and commands for writing a program from the woman who was looking out for me, and I was able to write the program but could not make it work.

During that time, writing programs was different. You would write a program using IBM punched cards, take your card deck to another building, submit it, an computer operator would run it, and then you would go back later after it had been run to get it. If it did not work properly, you would get a stack of paper printed out (called a data dump). My program always came back with a stack of paper printed out. The person who was supposed to be my supervisor and I would go through it, I would make changes, it was resubmitted, but the results were always the same. I was accumulating a lot of paper.
Your story makes the movie Hidden Figures come to mind, which depicts the lives of Black NASA mathematicians Katherine Johnson How accurate would you say the movie was in terms of depicting what it was like to work there and work on these really groundbreaking projects? , Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughn. Were you acquainted with these women during your time at NASA? You are responsible for the invention of the illusion transmitter, which is widely considered to be the basis for 3D technology. And when a lot of people cite your accomplishments, they claim that you invented 3D movies and TV. Can you clarify this for us?
One day I looked up and three people (my supervisor, his boss, and the branch head) came to see me. The branch head asked me about my program. After telling him about my program, he asked, "Why are you doing it like that?" And the person who was supposed to be my supervisor also said, "Yes, why are you doing it like that?" He had been going through the program with me every day before it was resubmitted to be run and I asked why he waited until then to ask that question. At that point, I could see that something was not right and, obviously, the branch head noticed that, too.

After that session, I got switched to work with somebody else and my star just took off like a rocket. I could see how a Black woman coming in during that time might become intimidated or scared and probably end up being let go for not being able to be productive. I was just given another person in the branch to work with and, because of that action, my career just took off.
Now that you've had such an amazing career, and you've left behind such an impressive legacy in the world of electronics, math, science; how do you tap into that world after you've retired and settled into your new life?
Yes, I was acquainted with Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson. I did not know [Dorothy]. I did not work with them. Things were different for African Americans in the STEM fields. It was not called STEM at the time, but in those fields. There probably would not have been a lot of African Americans working together in a company or agency.

However, I also found that even traveling to conferences was a challenge for an African American woman. I remember being at an IBM conference with a huge audience and probably a handful of African Americans. It was like being invisible.

I decided not to go to any more conferences like that. When I was introduced to the National Technical Association (NTA), a STEM organization founded by African Americans in 1926, its conferences were more welcoming for African Americans and many of us met as a result of joining NTA. That is how I met Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson.
When you look back on your amazing life, and your contributions to technology, what would you want your legacy to be?
I would say it was extremely accurate. I was just surprised that they did not have bathrooms that they could go to in the building that Katherine Johnson was working in. I did not know that they were going through that at the time. [In my branch, when I first started] we had several high level African American women. So, that made a difference for me. But, in terms of other kinds of things, such as promotions and types of job assignments, there were concerns. I was aware of people in other organizations where there may have been only one or two African Americans. The situation has improved over time.

I was at an event where there were informal STEM type activities. I was some distance away, but something caught my eye. I had seen two people at a table with a lamp sitting on the table. It was just a pole lamp, a light bulb was screwed into the top of the lamp, and the lamp was turned on. The bulb was unscrewed and taken out of the lamp; however, it looked like the bulb was still in the lamp and still turned on. That caught my attention. I went up close to touch the light bulb. When I tried to touch it, my finger went right through what appeared to be a bulb.

That caused my mind to wonder, what is going on? How did that happen? I decided to go to the library to look for a book to explain that phenomenon. I started in the section with physics books, then the section with optics books, and finally found two books that confirmed what my optics professor discussed in class and I could not visualize. It was a real image that is formed in front of a concave mirror. We are used to seeing virtual images, in which it looks like we are in the mirror. So, with my Landsat image processing expertise and my understanding about real images, I came up with the idea for the illusion transmitter. I envisioned a TV that, instead of having the imagery displayed on the screen, would have the imagery displayed in the air and would be visible without needing special glasses. I think that from that perspective, people think of 3D TVs because that's their concept of being able to see something like that. But, mine was that you do not need special glasses to see the imagery and it is in the air.

When I was working at NASA, I was very active in educational outreach. First of all, I was the President of the D.C. chapter of the National Technical Association (NTA) in 1974 and then became the first female National President of NTA in 1985.

And after I finished my term as NTA National President...somehow, I got pulled off in another direction to work with an organization, which became known as Science, Mathematics, Aerospace, Research, and Technology (S.M.A.R.T.), Inc. in 1986. People from NTA and other people were attracted to work with me on this project. S.M.A.R.T. worked with other organizations that had similar goals of preparing our young people for future careers in science and technology for the 21st century, and S.M.A.R.T. did a lot of education outreach activities. We worked close together. We called it science and technology then, but now it's called STEM. I spent about 35 years working with S.M.A.R.T. And then, I got introduced to another organization, SHADES OF BLUE. It is an aviation oriented STEM organization. Now I am President of the SHADES OF BLUE DMV (DC, Maryland, and Virginia) Chapter. We are focusing on preparing young people for future careers in aviation.

Oh, then plus, I am a substitute high school teacher at a school with an aerospace program. My students Google me.

I want [people] to think back on me, first of all, as a lifetime learner. I want [young people] to not run away from challenges. I like to share knowledge with young people. And I would like to see them take the knowledge to the next level.

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Meet Valerie L. Thomas, the Black woman who revolutionized technology

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Valerie L. Thomas, inventor of the illusion transmitter, changed the way we consume content. For Black History Month, REVOLT spoke to her about working at NASA during Jim Crow, her legacy, the 'Hidden Figures' movie and much more. Read here!

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Dr. Ngozi Ezike - submitted by Mrs. Fisher

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Dr. Ngozi Ezike - submitted by Mrs. Fisher

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CHICAGO (CBS) - We are certainly living in unprecedented times - as over the past year, we've witnessed immeasurable suffering, from racial injustices as well as from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through it all, Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike has been the calm, yet commanding voice we've needed over the year. Ezike is a Black History maker this Black History Month, and she sat down with CBS 2 Investigator Dorothy Tucker.

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We have barely known the names of many past state public health directors. But Dr. Ezike has been guiding the state through the worst health crisis in recent history across the course of 151 press briefings - many of them daily.

This director, who happens to be the first Black woman to hold the position, was thrust into the spotlight.

Tucker: "When you took this job, I mean, nobody could have foreseen."

Ezike: "Oh no, no, the governor knew! He said: 'There's a pandemic around the corner, are you still good?' And I was like: 'Oh, bring it on! Bring it on!'"

She was joking about that, of course. Dr. Ezike was appointed to her role in January 2019, when the pandemic was more than a year in the future.

But as to Dr. Ezike being ready to step in during a time of crisis? That's very much real.

Ezike's résumé redefines the word "impressive." She was high school salutatorian, graduated with honors from Harvard University, got her M.D. from UCSD, served her residency at Rush University, and went on to become an internist and pediatrician. She is also fluent in five languages - English, French, Swahili, Portuguese, and Spanish - and has always conducted her daily coronavirus medical briefing in both English and Spanish.

What is not on the résumé, but is equally important, is her job as wife, mother of four, and enforcer of the pandemic rules.

"They haven't rebelled. No one has run away," Ezike said. "So I think we're OK."

READ MORE: 6 Firefighters Injured While Responding To Large Fire In Bridgeport

The rules are unpopular with some. The ban on sports prompted students and parents to protest near her home.

"That wasn't a problem," Ezike said. "They were far enough from my home."

What was a problem was the emails and the threats. When Tucker asked Ezike what one of the most painful emails she received was, she hesitated as she thought about that pain and the discussion moved on.

But of course, the public has also provided Dr. Ezike with words that make her smile - such as those found on a card that an Illinois nurse sent.

"Thank you for all you do. Thank you for not giving up. We do depend on you," the card read.

While she appreciates the personal notes, Dr. Ezike is quick to credit her staff.

"I don't want to be the headline. It's about the work," Ezike said. "But there are 1,200 people who are doing the work."

And it is stressful work - setting policies to slow the spread of the virus, stop the deaths, and equitably distribute the vaccines.

"We've taken tough decisions that are just not popular," Ezike said.

But they are decisions she stands by despite the backlash, like one of her heroes - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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"He was on the FBI's Top Ten list. They put cameras and bugged his home. They called him an enemy of the state," Ezike said. "So at the time that you're doing things, it may not be appreciated, and obviously, history has been very kind to Martin Luther King Jr., and I hope history will look back on this time, and we'll be able to bring up the work that public health has done over this most incredible time."

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Celebrating Black History Makers: Dr. Ngozi Ezike Has Been Illinois' Guide During The COVID-19 Pandemic

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CHICAGO (CBS) - We are certainly living in unprecedented times - as over the past year, we've witnessed immeasurable suffering, from racial injustices as well as from the COVID-19 pandemic. Through it all, Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike has been the calm, yet commanding voice we've needed over the year.

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Dr. Andrea Ghez is an American astronomer and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, LA. In 2020, she became the fourth woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for the discovery of a black hole in the Milky Way's galactic center. - Mr. Whiteaker

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Dr. Andrea Ghez became the fourth woman in history to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for her discovery of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Dr. Andrea Ghez was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics this week for her discovery of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy! The astrophysicist, who is the Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics at UCLA, shares half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel of UC Berkeley; the other half recognizes Roger Penrose, a professor at the University of Oxford who proved that black holes must be a physical reality. Ghez was delighted to receive the award, particularly because she is only the fourth woman in history to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics. "I'm thrilled to receive the prize and I take very seriously the responsibility associated with being... the fourth woman to win," Ghez said after the announcement. "[And] I think today I feel more passionate about the teaching side of my job than I have ever. Because it's so important to convince the younger generation that their ability to question, and their ability to think, is just crucial to the future of the world."

Born in New York City in 1965, Ghez says the moon landings inspired her childhood dream of becoming the first female astronaut, helping to pique her interest in science. She was further encouraged by Judith Keane, her chemistry teacher in high school and the only female science teacher she had in high school or college. Ghez started her college career majoring in mathematics but changed to physics because, she says, "I love the research process. First you have to figure out what might be an interesting question to ask given what is currently known and possible to do.... While this can be a struggle because things are not totally ironed out, you get to see things in a way that have never been seen before."

After completing her bachelor's degree at MIT in 1987 and her PhD at the California Institute of Technology in 1992, she helped advance a technology called adaptive optics, which improves the performance of high-powered telescopes by reducing the distorting effect of the Earth's atmosphere and interstellar dust. This correction allows astronomers and astrophysicists to better study the behavior of distant objects in the universe. Working with the W.M. Keck Telescope in Hawaii, she and her team studied the orbits of stars near the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

Ghez and her team determined that their paths were only possible if a supermassive black hole was present in the Galactic Center, something that had long been theorized but had not been proven before Ghez's study. "Stretching the limits of technology, they refined new techniques... building unique instruments and committing themselves to long-term research," the Nobel Prize committee wrote in a press release announcing the awards. "[This] pioneering work has given us the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way."

Ghez is the fourth woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics, after Marie Skłodowska Curie, Maria Goeppert Mayer, and Donna Strickland. It's a field which is notoriously unwelcoming to women. A few months before Strickland won the Nobel in 2018, Wikipedia rejected a draft article about her arguing that her "references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article" - even though Gérard Mourou, her partner in her prize-winning research, had been the subject of a Wikipedia page for over ten years. The representation of women in physics continues to be the lowest among all the physical sciences, with women earning approximately 19% of physics degrees at both the bachelor's and doctorate levels.

Ghez hopes that her win will be another example that encourages girls and women to enter STEM fields - particularly her area of expertise, which she calls "extreme astrophysics," that is full of mysteries to be explored. "[Einstein's] theory [of general relativity] is definitely showing vulnerability," she says. "[A]t some point we will need to move beyond Einstein's theory to a more comprehensive theory of gravity that explains what a black hole is.... I hope I can inspire other young women in the field. It's a field that has so many pleasures, and if you are passionate about the science, there's so much that can be done."

Books And Toys To Inspire Future Astrophysicists

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Astrophysicist Andrea Ghez Wins 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics for Supermassive Black Hole Discovery

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Dr. Andrea Ghez became the fourth woman in history to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for her discovery of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Dr. Andrea Ghez was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics this week for her discovery of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy!

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Geraldyn M. Cobb was an American aviator. She was also part of the "Mercury 13", a group of women who underwent physiological screening tests at the same time as the original Mercury Seven astronauts. She was the first to complete each of the tests. - Mr. Whiteaker

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Biography

Geraldyn M. Cobb was born March 5, 1931, in Norman, Oklahoma, the second daughter of Lt. Col. William "Harvey" Cobb and Helena Stone Cobb. At the age of six Jerrie discovered the great outdoors and fell in love with the sheer expanse and wonder of the vast wide-open sky.

During World War II the family was stationed at Sheppard Field in Wichita Falls, Texas, where 12-year-old Jerrie experienced the joy of flying for the first time in her father's 1936 Waco. Soaring above the earth gave the shy girl a confidence she didn't feel on the ground.

After the war Jerrie's family moved to Oklahoma City. At age 16, Jerrie earned her private pilot's license. Her only thoughts were to buy a plane so she could earn a living as a pilot. After graduation, playing professional women's softball provided money for flying lessons. By age 18 she not only had earned her commercial pilot's license, but was a certified ground instructor with ratings in civil air regulations, navigation, meteorology, airframe, and engines.

Jerrie spent a year at Oklahoma College for Women, but found more joy by working at Chickasha Municipal Airport doing general maintenance and crop dusting work. Playing pro softball again afforded Jerrie the opportunity to purchase a surplused Fairchild PT-23 that she named "Par-a-dice Lost." The next few years found Jerrie working any job that would allow her to fly - crop dusting, pipeline patrol, or flight instructing.

She traveled to Florida in pursuit of a job as a DC-3 co-pilot, but was turned down once they discovered Jerrie wasn't a man. With no money to return home, she found work at an aircraft maintenance shop at Miami International Airport - as a typist and file clerk.

It was here that she met Jack Ford, president of Fleetway Incorporated, an international aircraft ferry service. He needed a pilot to help him deliver two AT-6's to Peru. Jerrie, all of 21, eagerly volunteered. He reluctantly agreed to give her a try, giving her the briefest of instruction. When Jack's plane was grounded in Colombia, Jerrie continued on alone, successfully, to Peru.

Jerrie spent the next three years delivering all types of aircraft worldwide, from trainers to surplus flying boats to B-17 bombers. In 1955 she left Fleetway, returning to Oklahoma City.

Over the next several years Jerrie set several aviation records for speed, distance, and altitude in a twin engine Aero Commander, earning her a job with the type's manufacturer as both a pilot and a manager. Then, in September 1959, Jerrie was presented with a once in a lifetime opportunity.

The 28-year-old was selected to be among thirteen women subjected to the Mercury astronaut selection process. Committed to earning her way into space, she successfully completed all three phases of the rigorous program.

However, three years of political wrangling and one contentious Congressional hearing later, NASA closed the door on sending Jerrie or any other of the "Mercury 13," into space as this group of women had become known to the public. It would be another 20 years before the first American woman would orbit earth and 32 years before a woman would command a space mission.

Spurned by NASA, Jerrie thought long and hard about how her piloting abilities might be better used back on earth. Melding a deep spirituality with her love of flight, in 1963 Jerrie felt called to become a missionary pilot serving the indigenous people of the Amazon jungle.

Typically flying solo in her Aero Commander, she pioneered new air routes across the hazardous Andes Mountains and Amazon rain forests, using self-drawn maps that guided her over uncharted territory larger than the United States. For the next 48 years Jerrie enabled the deliveries of medicine, food, seeds, clothing and other necessities to the primitive inhabitants of isolated regions, creating deep bonds of mutual understanding, admiration and friendship.

In 1973, President Nixon awarded Jerrie the Harmon Trophy, naming her "the top woman pilot in the world." In 1981 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her humanitarian work in South America.

With well over 10,000 hours of flight time, Jerrie more than fulfilled her personal obligation in the sky. As a record-setting and humanitarian pilot, she inspired many others on earth. This includes helping pave the way for all American women astronauts.

Jerrie Cobb is truly a trailblazing aviation pioneer, and tonight we proudly welcome her into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

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Cobb, Geraldyn "Jerrie" M. : National Aviation Hall of Fame

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Geraldyn M. Cobb was born March 5, 1931, in Norman, Oklahoma, the second daughter of Lt. Col. William "Harvey" Cobb and Helena Stone Cobb. At the age of six Jerrie discovered the great outdoors and fell in love with the sheer expanse and wonder of the vast wide-open sky.

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Hina Chaudhry is the Director of Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine and is also a developmental geneticist with expertise in cell cycle biology, stem cell biology, and regenerative biology. - Tanisha M.

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Dr. Chaudhry is the Director of Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine and is also a developmental geneticist with expertise in cell cycle biology, stem cell biology, and regenerative biology.

Chaudhry Laboratory

Specialties: Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular Disease

Board Certifications: Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular Disease

Education

MD, Harvard Medical School

Internship, Internal Medicine
Duke University Hospital

Residency, Internal Medicine
Duke University Hospital

Fellowship, Cardiovascular Disease
Hospital of University of Pennsylvania

Language

English

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Hina Chaudhry, Mount Sinai Health System

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Dr. Chaudhry is the Director of Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine and is also a developmental geneticist with expertise in cell cycle biology, stem cell biology, and regenerative biology.

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-Maggie A.

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This February, "Patient A1.1," as he was referred to in a CDC report, embraced fellow mourners at the funeral of a family friend after returning home to Illinois from an out-of-state trip. Three days later he went to a family member's birthday party, once again hugging and sharing food with friends in a time before calls for social distancing were taken seriously.

Three weeks later, at least 15 people who had been in contact with Patient A1.1 likely had COVID-19. Three of them died.

The man is what's known as a "super-spreader," and he is far from the first. Over a century before he unknowingly passed a deadly disease to loved ones, "Typhoid Mary" did the same. The doctor who stopped Mary was a rule-breaking feminist lesbian.

Three thousand New Yorkers were infected with Salmonella typhi in 1907, a disease that had a 10% mortality rate at the time, and it's believed Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant who worked as a cook for families in the city, is the main cause of the entire outbreak.

Assistant Commissioner of Health Dr. Sara Josephine Baker, who was " instrumental in identifying" Mary as the source of the epidemic, went to a house where Mary worked to test her. Dr. Baker and the police who escorted her " were met by an uncooperative Mary, who eluded them for five hours;" Mary even tried to stab Baker with a fork. As Dr. Baker described it: "I tried to explain to her that I only wanted the specimens and that then she could go back home. She again refused and I told the policemen to pick her up and put her in the ambulance."

In the end, Mary tested positive and was sent to forced quarantine after refusing to start hand-washing, self-isolating, or taking other steps to prevent the spread of typhoid. Discovery of an antibiotic treatment was over forty years away, so Mary remained actively infectious the rest of her life. Despite being contagious, Mary only spoke of wanting to get back to work, and the Department of Health kept her isolated against her will in a case of dubious ethics studied and debated for decades to come.

"As an unconventional public figure, she also shows the possibility of standing up to discrimination and living a fulfilling personal life, even in a time of prejudice," says Dr. Manon S. Parry.

After over two years on North Brother Island in New York City's East River (near Rikers Island), Mary convinced a new health commissioner to release her from her isolation in 1910. It didn't take long for her to cause another outbreak after going back to work as a cook who didn't wash her hands, directly infecting at least 25 people in three months but eluding health officials for five years of freedom that spread typhoid all over the city. When they apprehended her again, they put her back in isolation on North Brother Island 一 this time for the remaining twenty-three years of her life.

When she wasn't coaxing Typhoid Mary to get tested, Dr. Sara Josephine Baker focused most of her career on lowering infant mortality rates in the poorest parts of New York City. She was the first director of New York's Bureau of Child Hygiene, founded in 1908. Over the next ten years, NYC's infant mortality rate plummeted from 144 to 88 deaths per 1000 live births thanks in part to Dr. Baker's efforts in teaching and implementing sanitation efforts like handwashing. "Baker promised herself she would retire when every state in the union had a child hygiene service, and the spread of her ideas enabled her to do that in 1923 at age 50," wrote Dr. Bert Hansen, a professor in the history of science and medicine at Baruch College, in an article about the lives of LGBTQ+ medical professionals throughout history for the American Journal of Public Health.

"'Jo' Baker, consciously modeling herself on the fiercely independent Jo in Little Women, cultivated a self-image of being tough when it was required to get the job done, and she recounted many stories about this approach, such as her handling drunken husbands in tenement apartments, forcing vaccinations on men in Bowery flophouses, and being more comfortable working with the political machine of Tammany Hall than with reform administration," Dr. Hansen continued.

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100 Years Ago, This Lesbian Doctor Helped Contain NYC's Typhoid Epidemic

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This February, "Patient A1.1," as he was referred to in a CDC report, embraced fellow mourners at the funeral of a family friend after returning home to Illinois from an out-of-state trip. Three days later he went to a family member's birthday party, once again hugging and sharing food with friends in a time before calls for social distancing were taken seriously.

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First black women in space.

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A self-taught pioneer, Anning discovered Jurassic remains in her hometown of Lyme Regis.
She came across her first find - an ancient reptile later named an Ichthyosaurus - at the age of 12.
The Natural History Museum calls her the "unsung hero of fossil discovery", as the scientific community was reluctant to recognize her contributions to science during her lifetime.
She was not allowed to be part of the Geological Society of London. It did not admit women until more than half a century after her death. - Mrs. Fisher

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Dr. Charpentier is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry. In 2020, Charpentier and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing". This was the first science Nobel ever won by two women alone. - Mr. Whiteaker

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Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier (born 11 December 1968) is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry. Since 2015, she has been a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2018, she founded an independent research institute, the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens. In 2020, Charpentier and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing". This was the first science Nobel ever won by two women alone.

Born in 1968 in Juvisy-sur-Orge in France, Charpentier studied biochemistry, microbiology and genetics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University (today the Faculty of Science of Sorbonne University) in Paris. She was a graduate student at the Institut Pasteur from 1992 to 1995, and was awarded a research doctorate. Charpentier's PhD project investigated molecular mechanisms involved in antibiotic resistance.

Charpentier worked as a university teaching assistant at Pierre and Marie Curie University from 1993 to 1995 and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institut Pasteur from 1995 to 1996. She moved to the US and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University in New York from 1996 to 1997. During this time, Charpentier worked in the lab of microbiologist Elaine Tuomanen. Tuomanen's lab investigated how the pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae utilizes mobile genetic elements to alter its genome. Charpentier also helped demonstrate how S. pneumoniae develop vancomycin resistance.

Charpentier worked as an assistant research scientist at the New York University Medical Center from 1997 to 1999. There she worked in the lab of Pamela Cowin, a skin-cell biologist interested in mammalian gene manipulation. Charpentier published a paper exploring the regulation of hair growth in mice. She held the position of Research Associate at the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine in New York from 1999 to 2002.

After five years in the United States, Charpentier returned to Europe and became lab head and a guest professor at the Institute of Microbiology and Genetics, University of Vienna, from 2002 to 2004. In 2004, Charpentier published her discovery of an RNA molecule involved in the regulation of virulence-factor synthesis in Streptococcus pyogenes. From 2004 to 2006 she was lab head and an assistant professor at the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology. In 2006 she became private docent (Microbiology) and received her habilitation at the Centre of Molecular Biology. From 2006 to 2009 she worked as lab head and Associate Professor at the Max F. Perutz Laboratories.

Charpentier moved to Sweden and became lab head and associate professor at the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS), at Umeå University. She held the position as group leader from 2008 till 2013, and was Visiting Professor from 2014 to 2017. She moved to Germany to act as department head and W3 Professor at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig and the Hannover Medical School from 2013 until 2015. In 2014 she became an Alexander von Humboldt Professor.

In 2015 Charpentier accepted an offer from the German Max Planck Society to become a scientific member of the society and a director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. Since 2016, she has been a Honorary Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, and since 2018, she is the Founding and Acting Director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens. Charpentier retained her position as Visiting Professor at Umeå University until the end of 2017, where a new donation from the Kempe Foundations and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation has given her the opportunity to offer more young researchers positions within research groups of the MIMS Laboratory.

CRISPR/Cas9

Charpentier is best known for her Nobel-winning work of deciphering the molecular mechanisms of a bacterial immune system, called CRISPR/ Cas9, and repurposing it into a tool for genome editing. In particular, she uncovered a novel mechanism for the maturation of a non-coding RNA which is pivotal in the function of CRISPR/Cas9. Specifically, Charpentier demonstrated that a small RNA called tracrRNA is essential for the maturation of crRNA.

In 2011, Charpentier met Jennifer Doudna at a research conference and they began a collaboration. Working with Jennifer Doudna's laboratory, Charpentier's laboratory showed that Cas9 could be used to make cuts in any DNA sequence desired. The method they developed involved the combination of Cas9 with easily created synthetic "guide RNA" molecules. Synthetic guide RNA is a chimera of crRNA and tracrRNA; therefore, this discovery demonstrated that the CRISPR-Cas9 technology could be used to edit the genome with relative ease. Researchers worldwide have employed this method successfully to edit the DNA sequences of plants, animals, and laboratory cell lines. CRISPR has revolutionized genetics by allowing scientists to edit genes to probe their role in health and disease and to develop genetic therapies with the hope that it will prove safer and more effective than the first generation of gene therapies.

In 2013, Charpentier co-founded CRISPR Therapeutics and ERS Genomics along with Shaun Foy and Rodger Novak.

Charpentier has been awarded numerous international prizes, awards, and acknowledgements, including the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Gruber Foundation International Prize in Genetics, the Leibniz Prize, Germany's most prestigious research prize, the Tang Prize, the Japan Prize, and the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience. She has won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award jointly with Jennifer Doudna and Francisco Mojica, whose pioneering work has ignited "the revolution in biology permitted by CRISPR/Cas 9 techniques". These tools facilitate genome modification with an unprecedented degree of precision, and far more cheaply and straightforwardly than any previous method. Not unlike today's simple, intuitive word processing programs, CRISPR/Cas 9 is able to "edit" the genome by "cutting and pasting" DNA sequences: a technology so efficient and powerful that it has spread like wildfire round the laboratories of the world, explains the jury, "as a tool to understand gene function and treat disease". Also, in 2015, Time magazine designated Charpentier one of the 100 most influential people in the world (together with Jennifer Doudna).

Honorary doctorate degrees

Memberships

In 2019, Emmanuelle Charpentier is a featured character in the play STEM FEMMES by Philadelphia theater company Applied Mechanics.

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Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier (born 11 December 1968) is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry. Since 2015, she has been a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2018, she founded an independent research institute, the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens.

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She is an American engineer and computer scientist working in the field of computer imagery. She led the development of an algorithm for imaging black holes and was a member of the team that captured the first image of a black hole in 2019. - Mr. Whiteaker

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This week, the world laid eyes on an image that previously it was thought was unseeable.
Black hole picture captured for first time in space breakthrough
The first visualisation of a black hole looks set to revolutionise our understanding of one of the great mysteries of the universe. And the woman whose crucial algorithm helped make it possible is just 29 years old.

Dr Katie Bouman was a PhD student in computer science and artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when, three years ago, she led the creation of an algorithm that would eventually lead to an image of a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy, some 55m light years from Earth, being captured for the first time.

The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex)
IMAGE: Reaction of Katie Bouman, who led the creation of an algorithm to produce first image of black hole. pic.twitter.com/SyFsBejXHP

Bouman was among a team of 200 researchers who contributed to the breakthrough, but on Wednesday, a picture of her triumphantly beaming as the image of the black hole materialised on her computer screen went viral, with many determined that Bouman's indispensable role was not written out of history - as so often has been the case for female scientists and researchers.

The data used to piece together the image was captured by the Event Horizon telescope (EHT), a network of eight radio telescopes spanning locations from Antarctica to Spain and Chile. Bouman's role, when she joined the team working on the project six years ago as a 23-year-old junior researcher, was to help build an algorithm which could construct the masses of astronomical data collected by the telescope into a single coherent image.

Though her background was in computer science and electrical engineering, not astrophysics, Bouman and her team worked for three years building the imaging code. Once the algorithm had been built, Bouman worked with dozens of EHT researchers for a further two years developing and testing how the imaging of the black hole could be designed. But it wasn't until June last year, when all the telescope data finally arrived, that Bouman and a small team of fellow researchers sat down in a small room at Harvard and put their algorithm properly to the test.
Female Nobel prize winner deemed not important enough for Wikipedia entry
With just the press of a button, a fuzzy orange ring appeared on Bouman's computer screen, the world's first image of a supermassive black hole, and astronomical history was made. In a post on social media, Bouman emphasised the collaborative efforts that had made the imaging of the black hole possible.

"No one algorithm or person made this image, it required the amazing talent of a team of scientists from around the globe and years of hard work to develop the instrument, data processing, imaging methods, and analysis techniques that were necessary to pull off this seemingly impossible feat," said Bouman. While their discovery was made in June, it was only presented to the world by all 200 researchers on Wednesday.

Bouman, who is currently a post-doctoral fellow at MIT, is due to take up a post as an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, but intends to keep working with EHT.

Speaking in a 2016 TED talk, Bouman said: "I'd like to encourage all of you to go out and help push the boundaries of science, even if it may at first seem as mysterious to you as a black hole."
Topics

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mit - massachusetts institute of technology

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Katie Bouman: the 29-year-old whose work led to first black hole photo

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This week, the world laid eyes on an image that previously it was thought was unseeable. Black hole picture captured for first time in space breakthrough The first visualisation of a black hole looks set to revolutionise our understanding of one of the great mysteries of the universe.

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Dolores Huerta is an American labor leader and civil rights activist who with Cesar Chavez is a co-founder of the National farmworkers. - America C.

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Augusta Ada King, a countess of Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer. She was known for working on a general-purpose computer, and found out that computers can follow a sequence of instructions, or a program. - Ruchi P.

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English mathematician Ada Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord Byron, has been called “the first computer programmer” for writing an algorithm for a computing machine in the mid-1800s.

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Stephanie Diana Wilson is an American engineer and a NASA astronaut. She flew to space onboard three Space Shuttle missions, and is the second African American woman to go into space, after Mae Jemison. Her 42 days in space are the most of any female African American astronaut. - Mr. Whiteaker

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Last year, NASA named the first Artemis astronauts. The mission to return to the Moon begins with the first Artemis flight scheduled to launch later this year. We are featuring each of the Artemis astronauts to help you get to know these pioneering explorers. This week meet Stephanie Wilson.

Selected as a NASA astronaut in 1996, Wilson has logged over 42 days in space across three missions (STS-121, STS-120, STS-131). Learn more about Wilson with these three fast facts:

1. Wilson was the second African American woman to fly in space.

Mae Jemison became the first African American woman to fly in space for STS-47, which launched on Sept. 12, 1992. Wilson followed in her footsteps to become the second African American woman to fly in space 14 years after Jemison, when she launched aboard Discovery for STS-121 in 2006.

2. She has flown to the International Space Station (ISS) three times.

Wilson is no stranger to flying in space, nor is she unfamiliar with the ISS, having flown to the station for each of her three spaceflights.

During her first spaceflight, STS-121, Wilson served as a mission specialist for a 13-day Return to Flight test mission and assembly flight to the ISS. She operated the robotic arm to install the "Leonardo" Multi-Purpose Logistics Module and oversaw the transfer of over 15,000 pounds of equipment and supplies to the ISS.

Her second spaceflight, STS-120, delivered the "Harmony" module to the ISS, as well as an Expedition 16 crew member. Wilson served as the Flight Engineer, tasked with operating the robotic arm for vehicle inspection and spacewalk support.

Wilson's third flight, STS-131, was a resupply mission to the ISS. The Discovery crew transferred over 27,000 pounds of supplies, equipment, and scientific investigations to the station. Again, Wilson served as spacewalk support by operating the robotic arm.

3. She enjoys collecting stamps.

One of Wilson's interests is stamp collecting. She began collecting stamps when she was just a child.

"I mostly collect stamps off letters that I receive. I usually don't go out and purchase stamps but I like to be able to tell a story about a stamp: it came from this individual, on this card," Wilson told collectSPACE in an interview before her first spaceflight.

While Wilson would have loved to fly one of her stamps in space, she explained it was not permitted due to federal regulations which prohibit certain items from being included in an astronaut's personal preference kit (PPK).

However, according to collectSPACE, she did bring along a regimental flag flown by the Buffalo Soldiers for the Buffalo Soldier Museum in Houston, Texas.

Continue to celebrate Black History Month by taking our Black History Month trivia quizzes or read about 3 African American space pioneers who significantly contributed to America's space program!

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Artemis astronaut feature: Stephanie Wilson

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Last year, NASA named the first Artemis astronauts. The mission to return to the Moon begins with the first Artemis flight scheduled to launch later this year. We are featuring each of the Artemis astronauts to help you get to know these pioneering explorers. This week meet Stephanie Wilson.

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Marie Curie was A Polish physicist and chemist. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and she won two. Marie Curie did research on radioactivity and, in the end, she died to radiation in 1934 at age 66. - Matt Z.

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Mae Carol Jemison is an American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut.She became the first black woman to travel into space when she served as a mission specialist abroad the Space Shuttle Endevour. - Gabriella R.

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she is a mathematician and she calculates orbital mechanics as a NASA employee and was the success of the first subsequent u.s crewed spaceflights - Daesia O.

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She is an american marine biologist, explorer, author, and lecturer.  She has two children and her age is 85 years old.  - Audrina E.

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Lise Meitner who studied radioactivity and chemistry.  She discovered the power of nuclear energy.  - Layla W.

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Inge Lehmann was a female scientist who took the career of being a seismologist and geophysicist. She  discovered that the earth had a second layer which was the  inner core of the earth. She is the reason why we understand the different layers in the earth today. - Armani H.

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Mary Anning was a English paleontologist, fossil collector, also a fossil dealer who became very well known around the globe for her find of Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs along the English Channel at Lyme Regis in Dorset in the Southwest Region of England. Mary Anning Born in 1799 died in 1847. - Ben G.
This was a paraphrase from
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/anning.html

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She was the first known Native American female engineer. She worked on aerospace designs and numerous "design concepts for interplanetary space travel, and Earth-orbiting flights. - Mr. Whiteaker

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Mary Golda Ross spent over 30 years at Lockheed, much of it as a member of the top-secret Skunk Works program involved in cutting edge research during the early years of the space race.

When Mary Golda Ross, the first Native American aerospace engineer, began her career at the aerospace company Lockheed during World War II, women engineers were rare and most companies expected them to leave after the war was over to make room for returning men. Ross was such a phenomenal talent, however, that she not only stayed at Lockheed for over 30 years years, she became an integral member of the top-secret Skunk Works program involved in cutting edge research during the early years of the space race. As one of 40 engineers in Lockheed's Advanced Development Projects division, Ross was the only female engineer on the team and the only Native American. Her research was so secret that, even in 1994, she had to be coy with an interviewer about her work: "I was the pencil pusher, doing a lot of research," she said. "My state of the art tools were a slide rule and a Friden computer."

Born on August 9, 1908 in Park Hill, Oklahoma, a small town often called the 'center of Cherokee culture,' Ross was the great-granddaughter of renowned Cherokee Nation Chief John Ross. A talented child, Ross was sent to live with her grandparents in the Cherokee Nation capital of Tahlequah, Oklahoma to attend school. She loved math from an early age, and said that she "didn't mind being the only girl in math class [because] math, chemistry and physics were more fun to study than any other subject."

She went on to earn a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1928 at Northeastern State Teachers' College and a master's degree in 1938 from the Colorado State Teachers College, where she took "every astronomy class they had." During the Great Depression, she taught math and science for nine years in rural Oklahoma schools. On the advice of her father, Ross moved to California in 1941 after the U.S. joined WWII to seek out more work opportunities and was hired as a mathematician by Lockheed in 1942.

Initially, she worked on the P-38 Lightning, one of the fastest airplanes at the time that was used extensively during WWII. Her research on the effects of pressure on the fighter plane helped solve problems related to high speed flight and aeroelasticity. The war years involved nearly non-stop work and she recalls that "often at night there were four of us working until 11 pm." Impressed by her work, Lockheed sent her to UCLA following the war for a professional certification in engineering.

In 1952, she was invited to join Lockheed's top-secret Advanced Development Projects division, commonly known as Skunk Works, where she worked on "preliminary design concepts for interplanetary space travel, manned and unmanned earth-orbiting flights, the earliest studies of orbiting satellites for both defense and civilian purposes." She also worked on the cutting-edge Agena rocket project, and on preliminary design concepts for flyby missions to Venus and Mars as one of the authors of the NASA Planetary Flight Handbook Volume III. As she once said of her work in an interview, "we were taking the theoretical and making it real." By the time she retired in 1973, she had reached the rank of senior advanced systems staff engineer and had worked on the Polaris reentry vehicle and the Poseidon and Trident missiles.

In celebration of the opening of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in 2004, then 96-year-old Ross asked her niece to make her a traditional Cherokee dress. The green calico dress was the first traditional dress that Ross ever owned, and she wore it as part of procession of 25,000 Native Americans during the museum's opening ceremony. Ross also left an endowment of $400,000 to the museum upon her death at the age of 99 in 2008. She was proud to be able to contribute to the museum's ability to "tell the true story of the Indian - not just the story of the past, but an ongoing story."

In honor of Ross' work, the U.S. Mint's 2019 Native American $1 coin, which is dedicated to American Indians in the Space Program, features an image of Ross on its face. "Her achievements deeply impressed me," says Emily Damstra, the science illustrator who designed the coin. "From the beginning of my design process, before I had anything else worked out, I knew that my design would include a figure of her." Ross would no doubt be thrilled to know that her story is inspiring a new generation of mathematicians and engineers: when asked about women in the space program in the 1960s, she said that women would make "wonderful astronauts" but added, "I'd rather stay down here and analyze the data."

Books About Women In Engineering and the Early Space Program

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Mary Golda Ross: The First Native American Aerospace Engineer and Space Race Pioneer

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Mary Golda Ross spent over 30 years at Lockheed, much of it as a member of the top-secret Skunk Works program involved in cutting edge research during the early years of the space race.