CRISPR debuted 10 years ago, in a paper hardly anyone noticed. Jennifer Doudna reflects on the DNA scissor’s first decade

On June 28, 2012, a joint press release went out from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announcing a new paper in Science from an international team of researchers based there. “Programmable DNA Scissors Found for Bacterial Immune System,” it declared, hinting that the discovery could lead to a new “editing tool for genomes.”

That paper, “A Programmable Dual-RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity,” has now been cited by more than 15,000 publications and downloaded nearly 65,000 times. It laid out the inner workings of a system called CRISPR/Cas9, transformative work for which two of its authors, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry just eight years later.

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