Birth of Emmanuelle Charpentier

Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier was born on December 17, 1968, in Juvisy-sur-Orge, a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France.

Raised in a family that valued education, Charpentier developed an early fascination with the natural sciences, particularly the mechanisms that govern living organisms at the microscopic level. This curiosity would eventually guide her toward the study of microbiology and biochemistry, fields in which she would later make revolutionary contributions.

Her childhood and adolescence in France during the 1970s and 1980s coincided with a period of rapid advancement in molecular biology worldwide, including the discovery of restriction enzymes and the dawn of recombinant DNA technology. These broader scientific currents would shape the intellectual environment in which Charpentier pursued her education, ultimately leading her to the University of Pierre and Marie Curie and the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where she trained as a biochemist, microbiologist, and geneticist.

Her birth marks the starting point of a life that would culminate in one of the most transformative scientific discoveries of the twenty-first century: the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system, developed with collaborator Jennifer Doudna, for which she became a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 2020 — the first time two women shared a Nobel Prize in the sciences without a male co-recipient.