The character arc of Emmanuelle Charpentier
A life drawn by Character Arc from the public record
Born 11 December 1968 in Juvisy-sur-Orge, France. Between then and now sit a doctorate at the Pasteur Institute in 1995, two decades of moving between laboratories in France, the United States, Austria, Sweden and Germany, a small RNA molecule she kept following when almost nobody else was, a conversation with Jennifer Doudna at a conference in 2011, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. The line below draws the story so far, in order.
Tap the line to pluck it. Hover or tap any mark for its card. Drawn from the public record of her life; the sources are at the foot of the page.
Who is Emmanuelle Charpentier?
She moved country after country, following one molecule.
She was born outside Paris in 1968 and studied biochemistry, microbiology and genetics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University, finishing a doctorate in 1995 on antibiotic resistance in Listeria. Then came the part of the line that is unusual and uncomfortable: she moved, and kept moving. The Pasteur Institute, then Rockefeller University in New York, then the NYU medical centre, then Vienna, then Umea in northern Sweden, then Germany. Nine laboratories in five countries across two decades, mostly on short contracts, rarely with anything permanent underneath her.
What she was following was small. In 2004 she published on an RNA molecule involved in regulating how bacteria turn virulence on, the sort of finding that interests a handful of specialists. She kept at it, and in the bacterial immune system called CRISPR she identified a second RNA, tracrRNA, that turned out to be the missing piece in how the system cuts DNA.
In 2011, at a conference in San Juan, she approached Jennifer Doudna and proposed working together. In August 2012 they published the paper showing that the machinery could be programmed to cut any chosen DNA sequence, which is the whole basis of modern gene editing. She became a director at the Max Planck Institute in 2015 and founded her own unit there in 2018. Ownership of the patents has been fought over in the courts for years. On 7 October 2020 she and Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first science Nobel given to two women and no man. Her line is worth reading because the twenty unsettled years are not the prelude to the work. They are the work.
The moments
Emmanuelle Charpentier's timeline.
The 1990s
A doctorate at Pasteur
Milestone. A microbiologist, trained in Paris, at the start of a career that would not settle anywhere for twenty years.
Nine labs, five countries
Everyday, and it changed everything. Short contracts, repeated moves, and no permanent post underneath any of it, for two decades.
The 2000s
An RNA nobody was watching
Milestone, and it changed everything. A finding that interested a handful of specialists, and the thread she refused to let go of.
The 2010s
She met Jennifer Doudna
Milestone, and it changed everything. She walked up to a structural biologist at a conference and proposed working together. That is the whole origin.
Keep it in house, or share it
Crossroads, decided.
The paths laid out: approach Doudna and collaborate, taken, or work it out alone. The collaboration produced the 2012 paper that made programmable gene editing possible, and the two of them shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.
The CRISPR paper
Milestone, and it changed everything. The paper that turned a bacterial immune system into a tool for rewriting genes.
A Max Planck directorship
Milestone, and it changed her direction. The first genuinely permanent position of her career, at forty six.
A long patent dispute
Setback, and it changed everything. Who owns the technology has been argued in courts and patent offices ever since. This page takes no view on it.
Her own Max Planck unit
Milestone, and it changed her direction. An institute built around her work, after twenty years with no laboratory that was hers.
The 2020s
The Nobel Prize
Milestone, and it changed everything. The first science Nobel Prize ever awarded to two women and no man.
An honorary doctorate in Ottawa
Milestone. The honours still arriving, six years after the prize.
The line reaches today still adding to itself, which is why it is drawn now rather than at the end. What it has set moving is in every genetics laboratory on earth, and in the first approved therapies that cure inherited disease by rewriting the gene that caused it.
Your turn
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Emmanuelle Charpentier: frequently asked questions
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Sources
- Emmanuelle Charpentier, English Wikipedia biography.
- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020, NobelPrize.org (facts and press release).
- Jinek et al., A Programmable Dual-RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity, Science, August 2012.