How a peripatetic career made Emmanuelle Charpentier a Nobelist

Nobel laureates might be science’s biggest stars, but it is unusual to see them fielding requests for selfies and autographs. One exception is Emmanuelle Charpentier, the French bacteriologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020, whose recent visit to the annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting included countless photocalls with adoring young scientists.

The appeal of the 54-year-old French microbiologist goes beyond her obvious difference from other laureates – who, for all their brilliance, are generally grey-haired men in their seventies or eighties. It also derives from her research: unlike some Nobel-worthy achievements, the CRISPR gene-editing technology she pioneered with US biochemist Jennifer Doudna is unusually recent and understandable, with its huge potential only just starting to be realised for good and bad (a Chinese scientist was jailed in 2019 for creating three gene-edited babies).

Many young scientists are also fascinated by Professor Charpentier’s hyper-mobile career – including stints in five countries, 10 institutions and 13 different departments – and its contribution to her Nobel glory, even if they might not wish to go to such lengths themselves.

Now based at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for the Science of Pathogens, Professor Charpentier acknowledged that her peripatetic career had taken mobility to the extreme but insisted that this movement was crucial for science.

“If you have a lab with only French or Germans, you may end up with a population of young people who are less driven – they are perhaps spoiled and didn’t make the effort to go somewhere,” Professor Charpentier told Times Higher Education, warning that researchers who settle in a “comfortable life” and “maybe do not move” could become complacent.

“I saw it with myself – I was in France but what made the difference for me was to go somewhere else,” said Professor Charpentier. “You realise you are far away from your family and the challenges are different, and you have to adapt to another system.

“This is why we say that internationality is good [for science] as it brings different people with drive – these people make the environment more competitive. It brings people who are hungry, [particularly] those from countries where they have more difficulties, where they cannot do research the way we do it in the Western world.”

The necessity of having diverse and highly international laboratories was questioned by some Nobelists at the Lindau meeting. Germany’s Christiane Nusslein-Volhard stated that there were scientists “who do not interact much and do not need this diversity”, and could still do excellent research as long as they remained committed to their field.

For Professor Charpentier, however, diverse research environments are key to scientific success, even if “in the past the labs were less international and you had some great discoveries”.

Successful research teams could still be dominated by a single nationality, but their leading scientists were usually well travelled, she continued. “You can find an excellent lab in Germany being quite German – but there is some internationality in there as the principal investigators (PIs) will have had an international experience.

“When I was at Institut Pasteur in Paris, the labs were less international. But lots of PIs had been to the US or Germany or other countries in Europe for a postdoc, so they were bringing a different view,” she continued, adding: “Diversity is important.”

For Professor Charpentier’s own career, moving between institutions was crucial to her progress as a scientist. “My needs [from an institution] were different depending on the stage of my career – I chose places on what I needed and what I was looking for at the time,” she said.

“In general, what is most important is the freedom of research and a good infrastructure – not necessarily a very expensive infrastructure, but one that is sufficient to ensure scientists can find ways to perform a project.”

Collaboration with other international laboratories is also vital, insisted Professor Charpentier, whose message will resound with UK-based scientists feeling the pain of being frozen out of Horizon Europe partnerships over the past two years.

“You might need certain expertise or equipment, but sometimes these will only be found through collaboration outside the local environment,” she explained.

This meant tapping into pockets of disciplinary excellence across the world, she explained. “When you are competing with other top labs, internationality is important – research is more and more interdisciplinary, but also more specific and precise. Sometimes I am surprised that, in Berlin, there is now a bachelor’s degree in parasitology – in my day it was a bachelor’s in sciences,” she said.

“You realise that this internationality is really different types of expertise [coming together] – cultures are different, and ways of thinking are different, depending on where you come from. There is a certain energy that happens in the lab when you are interacting with people who are different from you.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com