Professor Emmanuelle Charpentier and Professor Jennifer Doudna have won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work developing a method for genome editing.

The award takes the number of women who have ever won the Nobel Prize in chemistry from five to seven. It is the first time the Nobel Prize for chemistry has been awarded to two women in the same year in its 119-year history.

Both scientists will equally share 10 million Swedish kronor for their discovery of “one of gene technology’s sharpest tools” – the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technique, or “genetic scissors” as the committee described it.