The Woman Who Kept Knocking on the Lab Door

In 2014, Jennifer Doudna's phone rang at 2 a. m. A colleague in Sweden had a question about CRISPR gene-editing technology — a breakthrough she had pursued for years through countless failed experiments, rejected grant proposals, and long nights pipetting samples that yielded nothing. Before the discovery that would earn her the Nobel Prize, there were seven years of asking questions nobody thought worth answering, seeking patterns in bacterial DNA that other scientists dismissed as genetic junk.…