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In spring 2012, the Lithuanian biochemist Virginijus Šikšnys was the first to describe how the enzyme Cas9 could be reprogrammed with a guide RNA and made to cut DNA at a chosen site the very core on which all of CRISPR rests. He submitted his work before his competitors. And then the editors stepped in: the journal Cell rejected the manuscript without even sending it out for review, and the process dragged on for months afterward. In the end, his paper appeared only in September after the work of Doudna and Charpentier, which Science pushed through in three weeks. A priority earned at the lab bench was killed by editorial arbitrariness.
The Nobel Committee knew all this. Šikšnys's work is canonical in any history of CRISPR, and the scientific community had already placed him alongside the future laureates, awarding all of them the Warren Alpert and Kavli Prizes together. And still, in 2020, he was cut. The committee hid behind the three-person rule and the "cleaner" framing of his rivals' work but the fact remains: the one who was first in time was simply not allowed on stage.
And now the central inconsistency. The prize was given "for the development of a method for genome editing." But the method that actually edits the genomes of living cells, rather than bare DNA in a test tube, was not carried over the finish line by the laureates, it was Feng Zhang who, in early 2013, demonstrated CRISPR working in human cells, and it was he who then won the patent wars. So the committee handed a prize framed around "a method for genome editing" to those who stood closest to the elegant paper and passed over both the man who discovered the principle earlier and the man who turned it into a real tool.
In the we see that women were awarded because they are women and also because institutions behind it wanted to patent the technology