Image Credit: Adam Baker/Flickr
Stockholm, Sweden –This year, four remarkable women are now Nobel laureates. The Nobel Prize committee awarded honorees Louise Glück, Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jennifer A. Doudna, and Andrea M. Ghez by acknowledging their contribution to the sciences.
Jennifer Doudna, an American biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Emmanuelle Charpentier, a French microbiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their 2012 discovery centered around CRISPR. Considered to be a controversial subject to many, CRISPR allows researchers to work in genome editing — to recompose DNA. This is the first Nobel prize in science ever won by two women.
Dr. Andrea Ghez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for her research in confirming evidence of a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way Galaxy. Additionally, Louise Glück, an American poet, essayist, and former Pulitzer Prize winner was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Nobel Prize has been awarded to women fifty-eight times in its history. In full, fifty-seven exceptional women from 1901 to 2020 have been honored with Nobel Prizes. French scientist, Marie Curie, is the only woman who has ever been awarded twice, in 1903 and in 1911. How will these women be able to capitalize on their awards to help other girls and women play a greater role in literature and science?
Sources:
- “Inspirational Women”
- “Nobel Prize awarded women”
- “What Is CRISPR?”
- “Meet the Women Who Won Nobel Prizes This Year”
Erin Mayer has been published in numerous publications. When she is not reporting, writing, studying or protesting, she is gardening, traveling, or at the beach with loved ones.
