Biography | Emmanuelle Charpentier — Born in Juvisy-sur-Orge Before the Train into Paris

People treat CRISPR as a Berkeley and Berlin story that arrived already named Cas9. The first town was this one, twenty-five kilometres south of Paris. Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier was born on 11 December 1968 in Juvisy-sur-Orge, in Essonne, on the Seine above Orly. She later called it a small and relatively quiet town at the height of the student movements. The pin is the town hall square a visitor can still stand in, not a childhood flat whose number no longer maps cleanly. The school years stayed in the southern banlieue. The laboratory years started on the RER into Paris. Pierre and Marie Curie University, now the Faculty of Science at Sorbonne University, took the biochemistry, microbiology and genetics degrees from 1986. Institut Pasteur took the doctorate. Vienna took the first independent bench. Umeå took the paper. Charitéplatz took the institute that still carries her name on the door. 11 December 1968 is the date. Juvisy is the first line. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Juvisy-sur-Orge