Two scientists recently shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for transforming an obscure bacterial immune mechanism, called CRISPR, into “genetic scissors” – an editing tool for re-writing the code of life.
The two female Nobel Prize winners accomplished this through collaboration – which is exactly how two Canadian scientists – Dr. Elizabeth Simpson (CMMT) and Dr. Sheila Singh (McMaster) – are working to crack the code on two incurable diseases – a type of congenital blindness in children, and a deadly form of brain tumours.