 You know, one of those things you can't prepare for it. It just hits you and go with it. In October of 2020, UC Berkeley professor, Dr. Jennifer Doudna was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work with CRISPR. CRISPR is a technology for genome editing, for rewriting DNA in cells. And it's exciting because it gives scientists a precision tool to change the code of life all the way down to a single base pair in a genome, as well as replacing larger sections of the genetic material in cells. They give scientists now a way to understand the function of genes, but also to repair disease-causing mutations. A possible game changer for the COVID-19 pandemic, CRISPR technology is currently being implemented into a rapid five-minute COVID detection test. We are very excited about its potential to be a COVID diagnostic. So that's been an active area of research, both in my lab, but in a collection of labs around the world, really. And we're actually quite close now to having a couple of different forms of the CRISPR diagnostic that we're hoping to test at Berkeley. But Doudna wasn't always as confident with her career in STEM. General chemistry and organic chemistry are just some of the classes students in STEM have to take. Known as weeder classes for their rigor, they tend to shy some students from the field. This, too, was the case with Professor Jennifer Doudna when she was in college. I did consider briefly becoming a French major. And why was that? Well, like many students, I was struggling in general chemistry at the time. I was wondering, do I have it to make it in this field? Doudna's key advice to students? Pursue your passion and stick with it. You really have to pursue your passion. And if you're passionate to do something, you'll figure out how to do it. And you should just stick with it. They're going to be, there's always struggles. And I don't think anything in life is achieved in some ways without a struggle. Overall, Dr. Doudna is proud of what her achievements mean for women in the STEM field. I'm proud of our gender. I think that it's a really exciting moment in a way because I think that it signifies that women's work can be recognized for its value. And I think for many women and girls, there's sometimes a feeling that no matter what we do, our work will not be recognized as it would be if we were a man. And I really hope we've turned that corner. Certainly this prize, I think, makes a clear statement about the value of CRISPR that happened to be done by two female scientists. And Emmanuel and I both hope that this is the start of many more. For CalTV News, I'm Amreen Singh.