George Church in 2010WIKIMEDIA, STEVE JURVETSONJennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, and Feng Zhang are widely cited as the primary developers of CRISPR/Cas9 technology. These researchers were undoubtedly key to the development of the bacterial immune defense system into a powerful and accessible gene-editing tool, but by assigning credit to just three individuals, most news reports overlook the contributions of countless other scientists, including George Church, who alerted The Scientist to this issue after reading an article on December’s Human Gene Editing Summit.
In the article, my colleague Jef Akst highlighted Doudna, Charpentier, and Zhang as the three seminal figures in the development of CRISPR/Cas9 technology: “The attendees are a veritable who’s who of genome editing: Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, Emmanuelle Charpentier of Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, and Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard—the three discoverers of the CRISPR-Cas9 system’s utility in gene editing—plus dozens of other big names in genome science,” Akst wrote. In assigning the lion’s share of credit for CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing to Doudna, Charpentier, and Zhang, Akst echoed countless articles on the technology’s origin story.
“I’m trying not to complain,” Church told me when we chatted a few days later. “I’m just making what ...
