HOW WAS CRISPR DISCOVERED?
Genuine eureka moments are rare in science, but one occurred a decade ago when research into a curious function of bacteria immunology exploded into a Nobel Prize-winning discovery. The 2012 paper by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier is already recognised as a landmark of science.
Researchers had been piecing together information about CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) since the 1980s. In nature, it's a molecular defence mechanism that bacteria use to detect and destroy the DNAof an invading virus, like a set of microscopic scissors. When a bacterium is infected, the ‘scissors’ cut and paste a segment of the virus DNA and insert it into its own genome. This trains the system to recognise that DNA and destroy
