Emmanuelle Charpentier

Emmanuelle Charpentier: The Scientist Who Kept Moving

At eleven or twelve she told her mother she was going to work at the Institut Pasteur. She did. Then she left, and kept leaving: thirteen institutions across nine cities and five countries, a career built on the deliberate refusal to settle anywhere comfortable. The insight that won her the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, she says, came to her while commuting between Vienna and a laboratory near the top of Sweden.

A Paris Childhood, and a Promise

Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier was born on 11 December 1968 in Juvisy-sur-Orge, south of Paris. Her mother worked in psychiatry, her father planned urban green spaces, and she had one older sister. Her paternal grandfather, born Sinanian, had escaped the Armenian genocide and settled in Marseille. She credits a missionary aunt with predicting the restlessness that would define her.

Alongside school she took piano, ballet and modern dance seriously for several years, and she has never treated that as incidental. "Art has had a significant influence on my scientific career," she says. "You need to be rigorous, but you also need to be able to let yourself go." It is a precise description of the combination her later work required.

Pasteur, and the Long American Detour

She read biochemistry, microbiology and genetics at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, then made good on the childhood promise, taking her doctorate at the Institut Pasteur between 1992 and 1995 under Patrice Courvalin, working on antibiotic resistance in *Listeria*. She taught at Pierre and Marie Curie and stayed on at Pasteur as a postdoctoral fellow.

In 1996 she went to the United States and stayed six years, first at Rockefeller University in New York with Elaine Tuomanen, studying *Streptococcus pneumoniae*, then as an assistant research scientist at NYU Medical Center, then at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis and the Skirball Institute. Bacterial pathogens, and specifically the way bacteria regulate their own virulence, became her subject.

Vienna, Then Northern Sweden

She returned to Europe in 2002 to head her own laboratory at the University of Vienna, later moving to the Max F. Perutz Laboratories there as an associate professor. In 2004 she found a small regulatory RNA molecule controlling the manufacture of virulence factors in *Streptococcus pyogenes*, the bacterium responsible for strep throat and, in its aggressive forms, for flesh-eating disease. It was the beginning of everything that followed: she was already thinking about small non-coding RNAs as the control system of bacterial behaviour.

Then, around 2008, she did something her colleagues found baffling. She left Vienna for Umeå University in the far north of Sweden, a long way from the centres of European molecular biology. "The move to Umeå was certainly risky," she has said. "But ultimately it was exactly the right decision." The pattern is consistent across her whole career: she moves when she is comfortable, on the theory that discomfort is where the ideas are.

tracrRNA

CRISPR sequences had been noticed in bacterial genomes and were understood, roughly, to be a kind of adaptive immune system: bacteria filing away fragments of viral DNA so they could recognise the invader next time. What nobody had worked out was the machinery. In 2011, in a paper in *Nature* with her student Elitza Deltcheva doing much of the bench work, Charpentier identified a previously unknown molecule she called tracrRNA, and showed it was essential for processing the CRISPR RNA into its mature form. The system was not two components but three: two RNA molecules and the Cas9 enzyme.

That is the discovery that is properly hers alone, and it is the one without which nothing else works.

One RNA Instead of Two

In 2011, at a conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, she met Jennifer Doudna, a structural biologist who had been circling CRISPR from the other direction. They agreed to collaborate: Charpentier's group in Umeå with the biology, Doudna's in Berkeley with the biochemistry and structure, and Krzysztof Chylinski and Martin Jinek doing the experiments.

Charpentier's radical suggestion, conceived on the commute between Vienna and Umeå, was to fuse the two RNAs into one. If crRNA and tracrRNA could be joined into a single engineered chimera, then a researcher would need only to write a sequence into that guide molecule and Cas9 would cut wherever they wanted. The joint paper in *Science* in 2012 demonstrated exactly that, and turned a bacterial curiosity into a programmable tool. In 2013 Charpentier co-founded CRISPR Therapeutics and ERS Genomics with Rodger Novak and Shaun Foy to commercialise it.

The Artist's Discipline

Charpentier moved again, to the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Braunschweig and Hannover Medical School in 2013, and again in October 2015 to Berlin as Scientific Director of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology. In 2018 she founded and now directs the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, and she is an honorary professor at Humboldt University. She has stayed a bacteriologist: her interest is still in how pathogens work, and CRISPR was, from her side, a question about bacterial immunity that turned out to have consequences.

Why Emmanuelle Is Called a Genius

Charpentier's particular quality is a fine ear for the anomalous small thing. The 2004 regulatory RNA in *S. pyogenes* and the 2011 discovery of tracrRNA are both instances of the same skill: noticing a molecule nobody had catalogued, in a system everybody thought they understood, and correctly judging it to be central rather than incidental. Cas9 without tracrRNA is not a tool, and no amount of structural biology downstream would have found it; that came from a microbiologist paying close attention to a streptococcus.

The second quality is a tolerance for professional risk that reads as eccentric until it pays. Leaving Vienna for Umeå cost her proximity, collaborators and convenience, and it is where the CRISPR work happened. She frames this in artistic rather than scientific terms, which is unusual and probably accurate: rigour plus the willingness to let go.

The honest counter-case is that CRISPR-Cas9 was a crowded convergence. Francisco Mojica identified CRISPR sequences; Virginijus Šikšnys reached related conclusions independently and shared the Kavli Prize with Charpentier and Doudna; Feng Zhang and George Church made the system work in human cells within months. Charpentier did not build the tool alone, and the Nobel she shares with Doudna was awarded for a jointly authored paper. She also did not pursue the therapeutic applications herself, remaining a basic scientist by choice. Her own position is that this is the point: "Basic research is essential for progress." On the ethics she is brief and unambiguous: "CRISPR-Cas9 can deliver huge benefits to humanity, but of course we need to handle it responsibly."

Legacy

The honours arrived in a flood: the Louis-Jeantet Prize, the Breakthrough Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Ernst Jung Prize and the Gruber Genetics Prize in 2015; the Tang Prize, the Gairdner, the Leibniz Prize, the L'Oréal-UNESCO Award, the Otto Warburg Medal, the Warren Alpert Prize and a knighthood in the Légion d'honneur in 2016; the Japan Prize, the Pour le Mérite and the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2017; the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience and the Harvey Prize in 2018; the Wolf Prize in Medicine and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020, the first science Nobel awarded to two women and nobody else. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2023 and elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2024, holds membership of nine academies and a dozen honorary doctorates. CRISPR Therapeutics, which she co-founded, helped bring the first approved CRISPR gene therapy to patients with sickle cell disease. She remains in Berlin, still working on bacteria.

Achievements

• Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany — 2019
• Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts order — 2017
• Wolf Prize in Medicine — 2020
• Officer of the National Order of Merit — 2019
• Foreign Member of the Royal Society — 2024
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry — 2020
• Held posts at Hannover Medical School, Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology and Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens
• Educated at Pasteur Institute and Pierre and Marie Curie University
• Fields of research: biochemistry, genetics and microbiology