Doudna received the 2018 Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science, presented in New York.
On October 16, 2018, Jennifer Doudna was presented with the Lasker~Koshland Special Achievement Award in Medical Science by the Lasker Foundation in New York, sharing the honor with Emmanuelle Charpentier.
The Lasker Awards are among the most prestigious prizes in biomedical science, often referred to as "America's Nobels" because so many recipients later go on to receive the Nobel Prize. This particular award recognized Doudna and Charpentier specifically for their pioneering discovery and development of CRISPR-Cas9 as a genome-editing technology, transforming molecular biology and enabling researchers worldwide to precisely edit DNA in virtually any organism.
The Special Achievement Award category, distinct from the foundation's other prizes, is reserved for individuals whose work has had an exceptionally broad and transformative impact on science and medicine, and it can be given at any career stage — a recognition of both the completed body of work and its extraordinary ongoing influence.
This presentation came two years before Doudna and Charpentier would receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and it was widely seen at the time as a strong signal within the scientific community that a Nobel Prize was likely forthcoming, given the Lasker Award's historical track record as a predictor of future Nobel laureates.