Emmanuelle Charpentier, Doctora Honoris Causa by Oviedo: “Spain is an attractive country for science”

Nobel laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier presented her work on the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology before an audience of over one hundred people at the Príncipe Felipe Auditorium. The lecture was part of the events celebrating the biochemist’s appointment as Doctora Honoris Causa by the University of Oviedo (IUOPA), following a proposal by the University Institute of Oncology of Asturias.

During the talk, titled “Decoding bacterial immunity: how CRISPR-Cas9 transformed life sciences,” several drawings made by Asturian children served as a guiding thread. These artworks belong to a series titled “Editing the Genome,” created by primary school students in 2015 when Emmanuelle Charpentier, along with fellow biochemist Jennifer Doudna, received the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research.

Charpentier addressed the audience and young scientists in particular, encouraging them to develop their research in a field that opens up new possibilities every day. “Although there are always things to improve, scientific research is often better today than it was 30 years ago,” she noted. She also took the opportunity to praise “the scientific quality of IUOPA” and pointed out that “Spain is an attractive country for science.”

In 2012, Charpentier and Doudna published the development of this gene-editing technique in the journal Science. By using a protein called Cas9, the method allows scientists to locate and cut specific DNA fragments. It functions like “molecular scissors” capable of correcting, deleting, adding, or replacing genome sequences. This tool has numerous applications, ranging from crop improvement to biomedicine, with a special impact on oncology treatments such as immunotherapies.