http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/prestigious-prize-overshadowed-crispr-researcher-wins-spotlight

Late in the afternoon on 30 May, biochemist Virginijus Šikšnys received a phone call that is the stuff of a scientist’s dreams: The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters informed him that he had won a prestigious award, the Kavli Prize, for his “seminal advances” in developing the revolutionary genome editor CRISPR-Cas9. For Šikšnys, who works at Vilnius University’s Institute of Biotechnology in Lithuania, the recognition was doubly sweet because his part in the discovery of CRISPR often has been overlooked. Šikšnys will share the $1 million award with two researchers who have received far more attention, Jennifer Doudna of the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and her collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. Conspicuously absent from the award was another researcher who has enjoyed the CRISPR spotlight, chemist Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Šikšnys first showed that the CRISPR-Cas9 system, a bacterial immune mechanism, could be transferred from one bacterium to another. He also independently made the same advance as Doudna and Charpentier: developing a way to steer the CRISPR-Cas9 complex to specific targets on a genome, which he called “directed DNA surgery.” Zhang’s group made its mark by building on these findings and publishing evidence that CRISRP-Cas9 could work in mammalian systems, including humans—which has been the centerpiece of a prolonged patent battle between the Broad group and what’s known as the UC team.