Jennifer Doudna on what it takes to be a good scientist

Jennifer Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for co-developing CRISPR gene editing, has spent decades thinking about what makes scientific discovery possible. In a conversation with Ira Flatow on Science Friday, she laid out a framework for doing good science that is less about raw intelligence and more about a specific combination of stubbornness, risk tolerance, joy, and the ability to navigate failure. Her argument is grounded in the messy, unpredictable path that led to CRISPR itself.

The path to CRISPR was indirect and full of failure

Doudna did not set out to invent a gene-editing tool. Her career began with a fundamental question about the origin of life, studying how RNA molecules might have carried genetic information and copied themselves. This thread of interest in RNA structure followed her through graduate school with Jack Szostak, postdoctoral work with Tom Cech, and into her own lab at Yale and later UC Berkeley. It was only through this RNA-focused lens that she eventually encountered CRISPR, after a colleague, Jill Banfield, discovered that bacteria appeared to have an RNA-guided adaptive immune system.