10 Women In Science And Tech Who Should Be Household Names
Today, in honor of International Women’s Day, we want to highlight just a few of the incredible women WIRED has written about over the years, whose work breaks boundaries, makes new worlds possible, and sets the stage for the future. These women are fighters, they are visionaries, they are tireless advocates for change, for progress, for hope. And you should know their names.
You’ve heard about gene editing and the magic “Swiss Army knife for genes” that is Crispr technology. Crispr ushered in a new era for biological sciences, driving a renewed interest in gene therapies for disease, raising the risk of “designer babies,” creating new ways to store information in DNA, and even making crazy-sounding notions like resurrecting the woolly mammoth to fight climate change maybe sort of possible.
And it was co-created by two women: UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, director of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, who published their work on bacteria in 2012. (The question of who owns the patents to Crispr technology has been the subject of an intense legal battle with scientists at the Broad Institute, who six months later published work using the technique in human cells for the first time. Last fall, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled in favor of the Broad Institute.
Last month, the US Patent and Trademark Office decided to grant Doudna and Charpentier’s original patent request, indicating the fight over Crispr intellectual property may not be over.)
