Hacker News Reader

Poor Francisco Mojica

Francisco Juan Martínez Mojica (Elche, October 5, 1963), usually known as Francisco JM Mojica, is a Spanish scientist, molecular biologist, and microbiologist at the University of Alicante in Spain, known for his discovering research on the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats-CRISPR gene editing technique.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Mojica

View on HN

I don't think it's a case of "poor" Mojica. He discovered some important properties around the palindromic nature of DNA in bacteria, as did others in Japan. While it was important, it is not the same level of contribution as Doudna and Charpentier. I don't think that there is much debate around this.

I disagree, he did not discovered a property, he discovered and described the CRISPR mechanism. He deserves a big part of the credit, without CRISPR there is no CRISPR-cas9. With this award, they are neglecting basic research and just rewarding the applications. Btw I highly recommend to read the Mojica story it is fascinating how he found it and understood how it worked.

>I disagree, he did not discovered a property, he discovered and described the CRISPR mechanism.

Exactly this! You cannot downplay his influence, at all. He also did speculate on plenty of those applications. Really weird to have him excluded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com