In the fall of 1981, Doudna enrolled in Ponoma College in California. Moving out to the school was difficult for her at first because she felt out of place among the students. She was only seventeen at the time, as she had skipped a grade, and she felt homesick but was only able to call her parents once a month due to the expensive price of calling over long distances. As she spent more time with chemistry, she began doubting whether or not she wanted to continue exploring the field because she felt like she was a more mediocre student in comparison to her peers. At one point, she considered switching to a French major and discussed the possibility with her French teacher. However, her French teacher told Doudna that she should stick with chemistry, stating that “‘If you major in chemistry you’ll be able to do all sorts of things. If you major in French you will be able to be a French teacher.’” Her view of science was reinvigorated over the summer when she had an opportunity to work at a lab at the University of Hawaii under her family friend, Don Hemmes. At the lab, she used electron microscopes to study microscope shells and see how chemicals moved inside cells. Unlike the labs she had done through school, the work she did at the University of Hawaii allowed her to experience making discoveries in science. There was no right or wrong method or answer for her work it was about exploring and interacting with other scientists to piece together a puzzle. She returned to Ponoma with a newfound confidence in her scientific abilities. In the summer following her junior year, she landed a position at a lab under a biochemistry professor named Sharon Panasenko. Doudna helped Panasenko with a project that studied how bacteria communicate with each other to combine to form a fruiting body that allows them to share nutrients. Specifically, Doudna was able to grow the bacteria needed for the research when other people had been unsuccessful. She was credited for her contributions when the research was published in a paper in the Journal of Bacteriology. The acknowledgment states that “I also wish to acknowledge Mary Ellen Tolberg, Greg Cohen, Jennifer Doudna, and Russell Smith, whose preliminary observations made significant contributions to this project.”
This is a PDF download of the first paper Jennifer Doudna was credited in. After some convincing from her dad, Doudna applied and was accepted into Harvard for graduate school. She began in 1985 after a trip to Europe over the summer at a lab under Roberto Kolter. The lab was international, so she was able to experience more of the global nature of modern science. At the lab, she was also able to develop more interpersonal skills as she developed more of her own voice and tried some of her own hypotheses for experiments. To finish her degree she went to work in the lab of Jack Szostak where she worked with yeast DNA and “engineering a catalytic RNA that could self-replicate.”
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AuthorMy name is Nathan Eberhart. I have a curious mind and am a creative thinker with an interest in biomedical engineering and medical devices. Archives
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