Women in STEM

Women win Nobel Prize this year in multiple STEM categories and inspire a whole new generation

Sameeksha Agarwal, Staff Writer & Abhay Bethur, Staff Writer

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier

Photos courtesy of Doudna Lab and Frontiers of Knowledge Awards

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their pioneering work with Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats or CRISPR. This event marked an extraordinary accomplishment for women in the STEM field and for young girls who look forward to their entry into the industry. 

CRISPR was originally derived from a defensive system found in certain bacteria; this system was used to fend off viruses attempting to infect the bacteria. In the naturally occurring CRISPR system, a specialized protein called Cas9 locates and cuts DNA from invading viruses. In order to function properly, Cas9 relies on a strand of RNA “matched” to the hostile virus’ DNA. As collaborators, Doudna and Carpentier split the work equally and shared as much as possible with each other.

“They collaborated across the Atlantic Ocean and internationally to take purified pieces of RNA and purified [Cas9] DNA,” Megan Hochstrasser, who currently works closely with Doudna and studied CRISPR for her Ph.D., said. “They figured out what are the minimal components of the system that we can use to cut somewhere.” 

Charpentier and Doudna had multiple inspirations for this project, including Jill Banfield, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Banfield worked in a different department than Doudna, but as she was sequencing microbes, she found naturally occurring CRISPR processes and consulted Doudna on what was happening. Although Doudna did not directly collaborate with Banfield, Banfield’s consultation sparked her interest in harnessing the CRISPR process. 

CRISPR has been a major use in medicine and could potentially be used in diagnosing COVID-19. Many scientists, including Doudna and Charpentier, are currently working on this. 

“People are working on turning CRISPR into a diagnostic tool to enable really fast coronavirus testing that could potentially be done at home with a little thing like a pregnancy test,” Hochstrasser said. “I think that would really help stem the spread because you're not sitting there waiting for a week to know if you're positive or negative and going out and infecting people.”

However, Doudna and Charpentier’s historic win was not the only extraordinary event to grace the Nobel Prize ceremony. Andrea Ghez, an American astronomer and professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, also made history, as only the fourth woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. 

Andrea Ghez

Photo courtesy of SciTechDaily

Ghez is notable for providing conclusive evidence that a supermassive black hole exists at the core of the Milky Way. For decades, the astrophysics community thought black holes to be figments of the imagination or the lackluster result of incomplete theories; even though Albert Einstein himself postulated the idea of black holes with his theory of relativity, he harbored his doubts. 

“Until Andrea came along, no one suspected that black holes are right in the middle of the galaxy,” Vivek Narayan, a professor for Mathematical Physics at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said. “Her work was very pioneering because, without her, we wouldn’t know about this supermassive black hole sitting in every galaxy.” 

In order to make such a discovery, Ghez’s team looked at the orbital velocities, or the rotations, of the stars very near a proposed black hole. Since black holes themselves are too bright to directly view, the team concentrated on observing the activity of the surrounding stars to gauge a general idea of the black hole. Further observations by Ghez and her team led to an even clearer picture, thereby proving Einstein's theory to be a near-certainty.

“When she started her research more than 20 years ago, the imaging technology was not performant enough to sustain her research, yet she persevered,” Northview physics teacher Christina Arsovan said. “She is a highly respected scientist, and her example will inspire generations to come just as she was inspired by NASA’s Apollo 11 mission that first landed humans on the Moon.”

The discoveries of these women have overreaching effects at Northview as well. One of Northview’s clubs, Girls in STEM, aspires to close the gender gap in STEM fields by inspiring the younger female generation through fun STEM experiments and explanations of scientific concepts.

“I think it is amazing that there is more female representation in these research advancements, discoveries, and well-known prizes,” Girls in STEM Club president Kelsie Young, said. “It is inspiring to see more women in these prominent positions and it definitely inspires the young girls we teach.”

Although Young’s club teaches STEM subjects at a more basic level, the fields in which women earned a Nobel Prize this year were incorporated into certain experiments. For example, the club explored genetics-related activities by making candy DNA and explaining recessive and dominant traits. 

“We do more chemistry experiments that can relate to space, such as making galaxy sugar crystals,” Young said. “While doing this experiment, we could talk about space and the amazing discoveries that are being made about our own galaxy, such as Andrea Ghez’s findings.”

To Young, recent achievements by women in STEM fields show promise for the future.

“I find all of their discoveries extremely interesting and cannot wait to learn more about them,” Young said. “I think that talking about successful women in STEM will help [people] see that the possibilities are limitless.”