Mitchell O’Connell, who completed his PhD with Joel in 2013 has had a taste of success in the US with a first-author paper in Nature on work that he spearheaded in his postdoctoral position with Prof Jennifer Doudna in the Dept of Molecular and Cell Biology at Berkeley Science Minister’s Prize. The paper follows an idea that Mitch had to adapt the Crispr/Cas9 system – the recently described protein family that has hit headlines as a programmable DNA-binding protein system for genome engineering – for the addressable recognition of RNA.