2020: Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for CRISPR [106]

Art Piece: Chemistry Building, Brookhaven National Lab, Per Brandin, 1978 [141]

Paper: A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease in adaptive bacterial immunity [85]

We have come a long way scientifically and also socially since early science paradigm shifts and Darwin’s era. Notably, the 2020 [106]) Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared by Jennifer Doudna [84] and Emmanuelle Charpentier [149] for their pioneering contributions to the development of CRISPR [200], a significant gene-editing tool which is ubiquitous in science today. Their win shows how far we have come, and serves as a more recent paradigm shift — scientifically, we have gone from not understanding the building blocks of organic life to now editing them ourselves. Moreover, their win also represents a social shift; in Darwin’s time, and even until somewhat recently, women have been historically minimized in science, so the 2020 Nobel Win of two women scientists also shows how far we have come in terms of the relationship between science and society. CRISPR has incredible utility, and shows what amazing achievements people are capable of, a monumental paradigm shift and breakthrough in science. Since Doudna and Charpentier’s Nobel win was in chemistry, the artwork above [141] depicts a photograph of the chemistry building in Brookhaven National Lab in 1978. Though this is most likely not very similar to the lab environments that Doudna and Charpentier’s teams did their CRISPR research in, it is still representative of shifts in science. The image seems dated by the standards of 2021 (soon to be 2022), a black and white photograph of scientific equipment and a lab space, in a time where science was less diverse as compared to today. In addition to lab spaces no longer looking exactly like this, we also have more inclusion and diversity in science than before, a large paradigm shift. The scientific paper above [85] is the one from Doudna and Charpentier describing CRISPR, a large paradigm shift in scientific discovery. We can only hope that future paradigm shifts in science are ones which make science more welcoming, warm, and inclusive to more people, in order to facilitate more breakthroughs in research and the improvement of more lives.