Walter Isaacson at UC Berkeley while researching his book, ‘The Code Breakers.” If you have received either the Moderna or the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19, you are benefiting from a biomedical tool called CRISPR. CRISPR technology enabled scientists to create both vaccines in record time, bypassing the clumsy and time-consuming methods employed in vaccine development in the past. The historic breakthrough that led to the now widespread use of CRISPR in biomedical labs around the world came only in 2012. And it won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry eight years later for a remarkable woman at the University of California, Berkeley, named Jennifer Doudna.