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The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
A Best Book of 2021 by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, and The Washington Post
The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a "compelling" (The Washington Post) account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies.
When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn't become scientists, she decided she would.
Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book's author, James Watson, told her was the most important biological advance since his codiscovery of the structure of DNA. She and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.
The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and internet. Now we are entering a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code.
Should we use our new evolution-hacking powers to make us less susceptible to viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! And what about preventing depression? Hmmm…Should we allow parents, if they can afford it, to enhance the height or muscles or IQ of their kids?
After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020. Her story is an "enthralling detective story" (Oprah Daily) that involves the most profound wonders of nature, from the origins of life to the future of our species.
The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a "compelling" (The Washington Post) account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies.
When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn't become scientists, she decided she would.
Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book's author, James Watson, told her was the most important biological advance since his codiscovery of the structure of DNA. She and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.
The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and internet. Now we are entering a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code.
Should we use our new evolution-hacking powers to make us less susceptible to viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! And what about preventing depression? Hmmm…Should we allow parents, if they can afford it, to enhance the height or muscles or IQ of their kids?
After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020. Her story is an "enthralling detective story" (Oprah Daily) that involves the most profound wonders of nature, from the origins of life to the future of our species.
Editorial Reviews
"This year's prize is about rewriting the code of life. These genetic scissors have taken the life sciences into a new epoch." – Announcement of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
"Isaacson's vivid account is a page-turning detective story and an indelible portrait of a revolutionary thinker who, as an adolescent in Hawai'i, was told that girls don't do science. Nevertheless, she persisted." - Oprah Magazine.com
"The Code Breaker marks the confluence of perfect writer, perfect subject and perfect timing. The result is almost certainly the most important book of the year." – Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Isaacson captures the scientific process well, including the role of chance. The hard graft at the bench, the flashes of inspiration, the importance of conferences as cauldrons of creativity, the rivalry, sometimes friendly, sometimes less so, and the sense of common purpose are all conveyed in his narrative. The Code Breaker describes a dance to the music of time with these things as its steps, which began with Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel and shows no sign of ending." – The Economist
"Isaacson lays everything out with his usual lucid prose; it's brisk and compelling and even funny throughout. You'll walk away with a deeper understanding of both the science itself and how science gets done - including plenty of mischief." – The Washington Post
"This story was always guaranteed to be a page-turner in [Isaacson's] hands." – The Guardian
"The Code Breaker unfolds as an enthralling detective story, crackling with ambition and feuds, laboratories and conferences, Nobel laureates and self-taught mavericks. The book probes our common humanity without ever dumbing down the science, a testament to Isaacson's own genius on the page." - O Magazine
"Deftly written, conveying the history of CRISPR and also probing larger themes: the nature of discovery, the development of biotech, and the fine balance between competition and collaboration that drives many scientists."- New York Review of Books
"The Code Break...
"Isaacson's vivid account is a page-turning detective story and an indelible portrait of a revolutionary thinker who, as an adolescent in Hawai'i, was told that girls don't do science. Nevertheless, she persisted." - Oprah Magazine.com
"The Code Breaker marks the confluence of perfect writer, perfect subject and perfect timing. The result is almost certainly the most important book of the year." – Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Isaacson captures the scientific process well, including the role of chance. The hard graft at the bench, the flashes of inspiration, the importance of conferences as cauldrons of creativity, the rivalry, sometimes friendly, sometimes less so, and the sense of common purpose are all conveyed in his narrative. The Code Breaker describes a dance to the music of time with these things as its steps, which began with Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel and shows no sign of ending." – The Economist
"Isaacson lays everything out with his usual lucid prose; it's brisk and compelling and even funny throughout. You'll walk away with a deeper understanding of both the science itself and how science gets done - including plenty of mischief." – The Washington Post
"This story was always guaranteed to be a page-turner in [Isaacson's] hands." – The Guardian
"The Code Breaker unfolds as an enthralling detective story, crackling with ambition and feuds, laboratories and conferences, Nobel laureates and self-taught mavericks. The book probes our common humanity without ever dumbing down the science, a testament to Isaacson's own genius on the page." - O Magazine
"Deftly written, conveying the history of CRISPR and also probing larger themes: the nature of discovery, the development of biotech, and the fine balance between competition and collaboration that drives many scientists."- New York Review of Books
"The Code Break...
Readers Top Reviews
Sankarasivasubram
I bought the book with an expectation that this will teach about CRISPR. But this tells about the early life, school life, marital life etc. of Jennifer Doudna. Gave up after about 100 pages. Very boring and puts me to sleep. Her life story is what you want to know, then you may like this book. If you are interested in the science, there may be better books.
Dr MikeSankarasiv
I'd bought the author's biography of Steve Jobs but have never managed to get through it. THIS book took me just two days to read and held my attention through every page; falls into convenient quarters if the reader needs to break the reading up. Excellent account of what drives a Nobel winner. Excellent account of a development that may become important in what is left of my lifetime.
Anantha NarayanDr
The Code Breaker traces the history of gene editing while simultaneously tracking Jennifer Doudna’s life — she has received a Nobel prize for being a pioneer of the CRISPR technology (an immune system that bacteria adapt whenever they get attacked by a new virus). There is a key difference between this book and Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. I did not learn anything new from the latter as I was aware of most of the key events in the life of Jobs and in the history of Apple; however the insights that he provided into Jobs’ personality and the behind-the-scenes happenings at Apple made it an extremely interesting read. The Code Breaker, on the other hand, was extremely informative given my limited knowledge of gene editing; however, in its quest for being informative, the book ends up being somewhat tedious. Doudna has led an extremely laudable professional life. However, her personal life has been largely commonplace, and while Isaacson tries his hardest to create a sense of excitement around it, he fails to do so. He focuses all his efforts on this front in the third part of the book — Gene Editing — where he chronicles the intense rivalry between Feng Zhang and Doudna, tracing their race to get credit, important prizes and patents. But this attempt falls short. The most interesting part of the book for me was the section where Isaacson explores the moral or ethical issues around gene-editing. This is best exemplified by the question, “would it be wrong to do so or would it be wrong not to do so”. Isaacson discusses where boundary lines should be drawn — somatic editing versus germline editing (the latter is hereditary), the use for treatment of diseases versus for enhancement of human characteristics, the types of diseases that should be edited out, disadvantages that are disabling versus those that are simply so because of societal constructs (such as homosexuality) and finally whether the individual or the community should control this. From this part onwards, the book is less about Doudna and more about the science. The book ends on an optimistic note, while discussing the Covid-19 disease and the race to find a vaccine, on how reprogrammable RNA vaccines could pave a way for finding faster cures to diseases and pandemics in the future. Pros: Helps understand the science of biogenetics, interesting debate on the ethical aspects Cons: Drags in parts
Wei ZhaoAran Jose
This book makes the same mistake as many others by implying that CRISPR-Cas9 is all that is needed for gene-editing. In reality, CRISPR-Cas9 by itself can only accomplish half of the task, which is finding the exact location in the genome very specifically and efficiently. To be clear, this is indeed a huge discovery, and Jennifer and Emmanuel's groudbreaking work is well deserved to win the Noble Prize. However, once finding the correct location for editing, all Cas9 can do by itself is cutting the DNA double helix at this location. Nevertheless, cutting alone usually disrupts the target gene by a mechanism called nonhomologous end joining. Human does possess another DNA repair pathway called HDR, which can fix the gene if a DNA template is nearby. Unfortunately, the latter one only works in the dividing cells and its editing efficiency is often miserably low, especially when editing in vivo. For all the above reasons, CRISPR-Cas9 needs to pair with other editing modules to complete the other half of the job, the actual editing, to fully unlock its potential. This is where the base editor or prime editor comes into the scene. Invented by Harvard Chemist David Liu and his postdocs, both base editor and prime editor can offer much higher "editing" efficiency than HDR. And both editors are widely adopted and hailed by the gene-editing labs across the globe since their debut in 2016 and 2019 respectively. As such, it is a major disappointment for this book that Walter Isaacson failed to dedicate at least one complete chapter to highlight base/prime editor and have an interview with David Liu to discuss his transformational work.
