'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. These genetic scissors have taken the life sciences into a new epoch.” – Announcement of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “This year’s prize is about rewriting the code of life. 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. 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?Īfter 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. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code. Now we are entering a life-science revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and internet. The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.

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. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.ĭriven 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. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life.

When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. 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. 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. A Best Book of 2021 by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, and The Washington Post

The code breaker paperback