UC Berkeley recipients of the Noble Prize will not be receiving the awards from the King as usual.
Berkeley (The Berkeley Post) – The King of Sweden, for the first time since WWII, will not be handing out medals or diplomas to this years winners of The Nobel Prize. That includes UC Berkeley professors Jennifer Doudna and Reinhard Genzel.
COVID-19 has forced the Nobel Committees to deliver the medals to winners homes, with just immediate family and consular or embassy officials in attendance.
The downside is that winners and their families and colleagues will forego the ceremony, including concerts and parties. The upside is that the entire world can participate this year via streaming video. Berkeley is proud to have more winners again this year.
Councilmember Ben Bartlett (District 3) says, “I’m proud of UC Berkeley for producing Nobel prize winners. Berkekey is proud to have UCB in our city.”
Jennifer Doudna And Reinhard Genzel And Why They Won The 2020 Nobel Prize In Their Fields
UC Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna, working with her colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and for the co-development of something called CRISPR-Cas9. CRISPR-Cas9 is a revolutionary gene-editing tool adapted from a naturally occurring genome editing system in bacteria, and that allows scientists to rewrite DNA.
Reinhard Genzel is a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of physics and of astronomy and director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. He’s sharing his Nobel Prize in physics with UCLA professor Andrea Ghez “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy.”