Do we like Jennifer Doudna?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A decent scientist who backs public science and fair access, with no harmful words found and a patent fight as her only real stoush.
Doudna was born in Washington, D.C., and moved to Hilo, Hawaii, at seven. Her mum taught history and her dad taught American literature. In Hilo, the island's odd plants and animals got her curious, and her dad handed her James Watson's The Double Helix when she was about 12 or 13.
That curiosity led to the work behind the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which she shared with Emmanuelle Charpentier for CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. Since then she has kept building at Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute. This year she picked up the American Chemical Society's Priestley Medal, its top honour.
Her big scrap is over patents, not people. The Broad Institute and the UC and Vienna group have fought for years over who owned the key CRISPR claims. In March 2026 the patent board ruled for Broad again, after an appeals court sent part of the case back in 2025. UC said it was disappointed, and the group is reviewing its options. It's a billion-dollar turf war, not a character stain.
On the harm test, nothing nasty turned up. When news broke in 2018 of babies allegedly gene-edited in China, she issued a public statement responding to the claim. Her argument is about access: she says her biggest ethical concern is inequality in who gets gene therapies. To be straight with you, we found nothing from her on trans or LGBTQ+ issues, either way.
She also puts her name to public science. At a 2025 Berkeley rally against federal research cuts, she said she would not be where she is without National Institutes of Health support, and urged people to contact their representatives. That's a scientist using her platform for the people coming up behind her.
The good stuff is concrete. Her institute helped test a custom CRISPR therapy for a baby with a rare metabolic disease, treated within months of his birth, and she called it a remarkable team effort. Now she's chasing $1 billion to train scientists and make personalised gene editing cheaper and wider. She's also a co-founder of biotech companies, so there's money in her corner too, but the stated aim is access for everyone.