Old notices
These pages collect together notices posted on the IUCr web site in past years. They are retained for archival interest, but there is no guarantee (or likelihood) that many of the web links found in these notices will still be active.
2020 Nobel Prize winners
![[CRISPR]](https://www.iucr.org/__data/assets/image/0004/150376/Chemistry-Nobel-2020.png)
The IUCr congratulates Emmanuelle Charpentier (Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, Berlin, Germany) and Jennifer A. Doudna (University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA) who have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of a method for genome editing”. Since Charpentier and Doudna discovered the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors in 2012 their use has exploded, with applications ranging from increasing crop yields and curing inherited diseases to diagnostic tools, including a test for SARS-CoV-2. Professor Doudna, a biochemist, has published research on Dicer, an enzyme involved in CRISPR gene editing, in Acta Cryst. D. In 2018, she won the Royal Society’s Croonian Medal and Lecture; the lecture, which features beautiful crystal structures to help visualise how CRISPR does the targeted gene cutting, can be seen here.
![[tilingpattern]](https://www.iucr.org/__data/assets/image/0015/145023/Tilingpattern.png)
We should also like to congratulate Roger Penrose (University of Oxford, UK) for his share in the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. Although not winning the Prize for crystallographic work, Sir Roger is well known to crystallographers for the Penrose tiling model, which is used to aid the understanding of quasicrystalline structure. See here for a report on his Bragg Lecture at the 25th BCA Spring Meeting in 2007 by John Helliwell, and here for an article on “Deformed Penrose tiling and quasicrystals” by Richard Welberry.
