Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier

CRISPR researchers Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley and Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology have been awarded the 2017 Japan Prize.

The Japan Prize Foundation said it was honoring their work on "deciphering the molecular details of the type II bacterial immune system CRISPR/Cas and the creation of the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing system."

The Japan Prize is awarded each year to researchers in two pre-selected fields. This year's fields were "Life Science" and "Electronics, Information, and Communication."