Sloan Science in Cinema Prize: Frankenstein

Mexican-born filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has created a distinctive cinematic style mixing the world of horror, fantasy, and his exuberant personal visual imagery. He studied under Oscar-winning special effects artist Dick Smith and made his first feature film, Cronos, in 1993, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Critics Prize. Since then, he has directed and produced numerous films in both the United States and internationally, including The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) which earned del Toro a Best Screenplay Oscar nomination and won the Academy Awards for Art Direction, Cinematography, and Makeup, Mimic (1997), Hellboy (2004), Pacific Rim (2013), and Crimson Peak (2015). Del Toro wrote and directed The Shape of Water (2017), which was nominated for 13 Academy Awards and won four, including Best Picture and Best Director. In addition, the filmmaker garnered both the Golden Globe Award and the BAFTA for Best Director. His first stop-motion feature, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022), which he directed alongside the late legend Mark Gustafson, won the Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and Producers Guild Best Animated Film awards. Del Toro’s work has been characterized by a strong connection to fairy tales and horror, with an effort to infuse visual or poetic beauty into the grotesque.

Dr. Jennifer A. Doudna is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair and a Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her groundbreaking development of CRISPR-Cas9 as a genome engineering technology, with collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, earned the two the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and forever changed the course of human and agricultural genomics research.

In addition to her scientific achievements, Doudna is also a leader in public discussion of the ethical implications of genome editing for human biology and societies, and advocates for thoughtful approaches to the development of policies around the safe use of CRISPR technology.

Doudna is also a Foreign Member of the Royal Society and has received numerous other honors including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2015), the Japan Prize (2016), Kavli Prize (2018), the LUI Che Woo Welfare Betterment Prize (2019), and the Wolf Prize in Medicine (2020). Doudna’s work led TIME to recognize her as one of the “100 Most Influential People” in 2015 and a runner-up for “Person of the Year” in 2016. She is the co-author of “A Crack in Creation,” a personal account of her research and the societal and ethical implications of gene editing.