The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020
The discovery is beyond doubt deserving of the award. It was also awarded only 8 years after the publication.It's a bit sad though that Virginijus Šikšnys didn't get any credit for the discovery, because his paper sent over a month earlier was rejected by Cell.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginijus_%C5%A0ik%C5%A1nys#P...Edit: The Nobel award paper writes this on his findings: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2020/10/advanced-chemistr...> Similar findings were also published in another report using the related CRISPR-Cas system in Streptococcus. As in Charpentier and Doudna’s work, this report also demonstrated that Cas9 cleaves within the protospacer, that cleavage specificity is directed by the crRNA  sequence, and that the two nuclease domains within Cas9, each cleave  one strand. However, the researchers did not notice the crucial importance of tracrRNA for sequence-specific cleavage of target DNA [29].So I guess it's a bit more complicated than just having missed the publication.