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50 free Jennifer Doudna trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Jennifer Doudna nearly switched her major to French. Instead she solved the first three-dimensional structure of a ribozyme, took a Google-search cold call from a Berkeley colleague about odd bacterial repeats, and in 2012 showed with Emmanuelle Charpentier that CRISPR-Cas9 could be programmed to cut any DNA. Eight years later the pair shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first science Nobel ever won by two women alone. This Jennifer Doudna trivia quiz runs 50 questions across her life and work: growing up in Hilo, the copy of The Double Helix her father gave her, Pomona and Harvard, Jack Szostak and Thomas Cech, the ribozyme structure at Yale, the move to Berkeley, the two-month Genentech detour, Jillian Banfield, Charpentier and the Puerto Rico meeting, Cas9 and guide RNA, the Broad Institute patent battle, the companies she co-founded, her COVID testing lab, A Crack in Creation and the long list of prizes. Easy questions come first; the last third is for people who know their tracrRNA from their crRNA. Every answer is verified against Wikipedia's articles on Doudna, Charpentier and CRISPR, with the supporting sentence quoted under each question. Fans of this quiz should also try our genetics and famous scientists quizzes.
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Q 01Doudna's Nobel-winning method is a way of editing what?
Genomes
She and Charpentier were the first to propose in 2012 that a bacterial immune system could be programmed to rewrite DNA.
Q 02Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize with which scientist?
Emmanuelle Charpentier
It was the first science Nobel ever won by two women alone.
Q 03Doudna's 2020 Nobel Prize was awarded in which category?
Chemistry
Many expected the medicine prize; the chemistry committee got there first.
Q 04Doudna has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since which year?
1997
HHMI funds the person rather than the project, which gave her freedom to chase odd bacterial sequences.
Q 05Doudna was born in 1964 in which city?
Washington, D.C.
Her father had a Ph.D. in English literature and her mother a master's in education.
Q 06When Doudna was seven, her family moved to which state so her father could teach American literature?
Hawaii
He took a post at the University of Hawaii at Hilo; she grew up fascinated by the island's flora and fauna.
Q 07Which book, given to her by her father in sixth grade, was a major inspiration for Doudna?
The Double Helix
James Watson's 1968 account of discovering DNA's structure sat among the popular-science books he kept at home.
Q 08Which 10th-grade Hilo High School teacher does Doudna credit as a major influence on her pursuing science?
Chemistry (Jeanette Wong)
She also spent a summer working in the lab of mycologist Don Hemmes before graduating in 1981.
Q 09Doudna did her undergraduate degree in biochemistry at which California college?
Pomona
Professors Fred Grieman and Corwin Hansch there had a major impact on her.
Q 10As a college sophomore, Doudna considered switching her major to what?
French
Ironically it was her French teacher who persuaded her to stay in science.
Q 11Doudna earned her Ph.D. in 1989 from which institution?
Harvard Medical School
Her dissertation was on a system that increased the efficiency of a self-replicating catalytic RNA.
Q 12Who supervised Doudna's Ph.D. dissertation?
Jack W. Szostak
Szostak later shared the 2009 Nobel for telomeres; her postdoc adviser Cech had already won one for RNA catalysis.
Q 13As a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, Doudna worked with which Nobel laureate?
Thomas Cech
She went there to crystallise an RNA enzyme, and met her future husband, then a graduate student.
Q 21What search phrase did the colleague who introduced Doudna to CRISPR type into Google?
"RNAi and UC Berkeley"
The rest is history, and a Nobel Prize.
Q 22The CRISPR system's DNA-cutting protein, which Doudna compared to scissors, is called what?
Cas9
It comes from the Streptococcus bacterial immune system and cooperates with a guide RNA to find its target.
Q 23In nature, CRISPR is an immune system that protects bacteria against what?
Viruses
Bacteria store fragments of past invaders' DNA and use them to recognise and slice up the next attack.
Q 14Doudna's early career focused on determining the structure of which kind of molecule?
Ribozymes
RNA enzymes could not be understood, she realised, until someone could actually see their three-dimensional shape.
Q 15Doudna's group solved the structure of the catalytic core of a Group I ribozyme from which organism?
Tetrahymena
They found a core of five magnesium ions in the P4-P6 domain around which the rest of the RNA folded.
Q 16How many magnesium ions did Doudna's group find clustered at the core of the ribozyme's P4-P6 domain?
Five
They form a hydrophobic core, analogous but chemically distinct from the hydrophobic amino-acid cores of proteins.
Q 17Doudna joined the faculty of which university as an assistant professor in 1994?
Yale
She finished the ribozyme structure there in 1996 and became Henry Ford II Professor in 2000.
Q 18Doudna moved to Berkeley in 2002 to join which person, already there?
Her husband, Jamie Cate
Cate preferred the informal West Coast; Doudna liked that Berkeley was a public university, and the couple's son was born that year.
Q 19Which biotech company did Doudna leave Berkeley for in 2009, returning after two months?
Genentech
Colleague Michael Marletta helped her come back, and she cleared her obligations to concentrate on CRISPR.
Q 20Which Berkeley scientist introduced Doudna to CRISPR in 2006 after finding her via a Google search?
Jillian Banfield
The search result was a cold call that changed both their careers.
Q 24The letters CRISPR stand for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic what?
Repeats
Each repeat is separated by a spacer derived from a bacteriophage that infected the cell or its ancestors.
Q 25Who first described the DNA sequences later called CRISPR, in 1987?
Yoshizumi Ishino
His team cloned them by accident from E. coli; Spaniard Francisco Mojica later worked out what they did.
Q 26Doudna and Charpentier first met in 2011 at a conference in which place?
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Charpentier's lab had shown that a small RNA called tracrRNA was essential to the system; the collaboration began there.
Q 27What is the synthetic molecule Doudna and Charpentier created to steer Cas9 to a chosen DNA sequence?
Guide RNA
It is a chimera of the natural crRNA and tracrRNA, which is what made the system programmable.
Q 28Which organisation won the 2017 US patent decision over CRISPR-Cas9 in human cells?
The Broad Institute
A rival group had shown editing in cultured human cells months after the Doudna-Charpentier paper; the appeals court upheld the ruling in 2018.
Q 29Who showed CRISPR-Cas9 could edit human cells shortly after Doudna and Charpentier published?
Feng Zhang
Doudna nonetheless co-founded Editas Medicine with him in 2013, then quit the following June.
Q 30Doudna co-founded which company in 2011 to commercialise CRISPR technology?
Caribou Biosciences
Intellia is a Caribou spin-off; Editas came in 2013 and Mammoth in 2017.