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The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race Kindle Edition
In the spring of 2012, the Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the future of 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. It has already been deployed to cure deadly diseases, fight the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, and make inheritable changes in the genes of babies.
The development of CRISPR and the war against coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been an information-technology era, based on the microchip, the computer, and the internet. Now we are entering an even more momentous era, a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be surpassed by those who study the code of life.
Should we use our new evolution-hacking powers to make us less susceptible to viruses and eliminate dreaded disorders? What a wonderful boon that would be! Right? And what about preventing congenital deafness or blindness? Or being very short? Or being depressed? Hmmm…How should we think about that? Should we allow parents, if they can afford it, to enhance the IQ or height or memory or muscles of their kids?
After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with these moral and policy issues. Her life story illustrates that the key to innovation is connecting basic science to our everyday lives—moving discoveries from our labs to our bedsides—in ways that respect our moral values. It’s a thrilling detective tale that involves the most profound wonders of nature, from the origins of life to the future of our species.
- Print length533 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster Australia
- Publication dateMarch 9, 2021
- File size55202 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Review
"When a great biographer combines his own fascination with science and a superb narrative style, the result is magic. This important and powerful work, written in the tradition of The Double Helix, allows us not only to follow the story of a brilliant and inspired scientist as she engages in a fierce competitive race, but to experience for ourselves the wonders of nature and the joys of discovery." —Doris Kearns Goodwin
“He’s done it again. The Code Breaker is another Walter Isaacson must-read. This time he has a heroine who will be for the ages; a worldwide cast of remarkable, fiercely competitive scientists; and a string of discoveries that will change our lives far more than the iPhone did. The tale is gripping. The implications mind-blowing.” – Atul Gawande
"An extraordinary book that delves into one of the most path-breaking biological technologies of our times and the creators who helped birth it. This brilliant book is absolutely necessary reading for our era." — Siddhartha Mukherjee
“Now more than ever we should appreciate the beauty of nature and the importance of scientific research; This book and Jennifer Doudna’s career show how thrilling it can be to understand how life works.” —Sue Desmond-Hellmann
“An extraordinarily detailed and revealing account of scientific progress and competition that grants readers behind-the-scenes access to the scientific process, which the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us remains opaque to the wider public. It also provides lessons in science communication that go beyond the story itself.” – Science Magazine
“An indispensable guide to the brave… new world we have entered." – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"A vital book about the next big thing in science—and yet another top-notch biography from Isaacson." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"In Isaacson's splendid saga of how big science really operates, curiosity and creativity, discovery and innovation, obsession and strong personalities, competitiveness and collaboration, and the beauty of nature all stand out." — Booklist (starred review)
"Isaacson depicts science at its most exhilarating in this lively biography of Jennifer Doudna, the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in medicine for her work on the CRISPR system of gene editing...The result is a gripping account of a great scientific advancement and of the dedicated scientists who realized it." — Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
"Isaacson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of best sellers Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs, offers a startling, insightful look at this lifesaving, hugely significant scientific advancement and the brilliant Doudna, who wrestles with the serious moral questions that accompany her creation. Should this technology be offered to parents to tailor-make their babies into athletes or Einsteins? Who gets altered and saved and why?” — AARP
"A brilliant and engaging book. There are many quotable gems but I have chosen one sentence from the epilogue that epitomizes not only Doudna but also Isaacson himself, whose book title ends with a hortatory claim that CRISPR affects the future of the human race: 'To guide us, we will need not only scientists, but humanists. And most important, we will need people who feel comfortable in both words, like Jennifer Doudna.'" — Policy Magazine
“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 Breaker is in some respects a journal of our 2020 plague year.”— The New York Times
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Into the Breach
Jennifer Doudna couldn’t sleep. Berkeley, the university where she was a superstar for her role in inventing the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, had just shut down its campus because of the fast-spreading coronavirus pandemic. Against her better judgment, she had driven her son, Andy, a high school senior, to the train station so he could go to Fresno for a robot-building competition. Now, at 2 a.m., she roused her husband and insisted that they retrieve him before the start of the match, when more than twelve hundred kids would be gathering in an indoor convention center. They pulled on
their clothes, got in the car, found an open gas station, and made the three-hour drive. Andy, an only child, was not happy to see them, but they convinced him to pack up and come home. As they pulled out of the parking lot, Andy got a text from the team: “Robotics match cancelled! All kids to leave immediately!”
This was the moment, Doudna recalls, that she realized her world, and the world of science, had changed. The government was fumbling its response to COVID, so it was time for professors and graduate students, clutching their test tubes and raising their pipettes high, to rush into the breach. The next day—Friday, March 13, 2020—she led a meeting of her Berkeley colleagues and other scientists in the Bay Area to discuss what roles they might play.
A dozen of them made their way across the abandoned Berkeley campus and converged on the sleek stone-and-glass building that housed her lab. The chairs in the ground-floor conference room were clustered together, so the first thing they did was move them six feet apart. Then they turned on a video system so that fifty other researchers from nearby universities could join by Zoom. As she stood in front of the room to rally them, Doudna displayed an intensity that she usually kept masked by a calm façade. “This is not something that academics typically do,” she told them. “We need to step up.”2
It was fitting that a virus-fighting team would be led by a CRISPR pioneer. The gene-editing tool that Doudna and others developed in 2012 is based on a virus-fighting trick used by bacteria, which have been battling viruses for more than a billion years. In their DNA, bacteria develop clustered repeated sequences, known as CRISPRs, that can remember and then destroy viruses that attack them. In other words, it’s an immune system that can adapt itself to fight each new wave of viruses—just what we humans need in an era that has been plagued, as if we were still in the Middle Ages, by repeated viral epidemics.
Always prepared and methodical, Doudna (pronounced DOWDnuh) presented slides that suggested ways they might take on the coronavirus. She led by listening. Although she had become a science celebrity, people felt comfortable engaging with her. She had mastered the art of being tightly scheduled while still finding the time to connect with people emotionally.
The first team that Doudna assembled was given the job of creating a coronavirus testing lab. One of the leaders she tapped was a postdoc named Jennifer Hamilton who, a few months earlier, had spent a day teaching me to use CRISPR to edit human genes. I was pleased, but also a bit unnerved, to see how easy it was. Even I could do it!
Another team was given the mission of developing new types of coronavirus tests based on CRISPR. It helped that Doudna liked commercial enterprises. Three years earlier, she and two of her graduate students had started a company to use CRISPR as a tool for detecting viral diseases.
In launching an effort to find new tests to detect the coronavirus, Doudna was opening another front in her fierce but fruitful struggle with a cross-country competitor. Feng Zhang, a charming young China-born and Iowa-raised researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, had been her rival in the 2012 race to turn CRISPR into a gene-editing tool, and ever since then they had been locked in an intense competition to make scientific discoveries and form CRISPRbased companies. Now, with the outbreak of the pandemic, they would engage in another race, this one spurred not by the pursuit of patents but by a desire to do good.
Doudna settled on ten projects. She suggested leaders for each and told the others to sort themselves into the teams. They should pair up with someone who would perform the same functions, so that there could be a battlefield promotion system: if any of them were struck by the virus, there would be someone to step in and continue their work. It was the last time they would meet in person. From then on the teams would collaborate by Zoom and Slack.
“I’d like everyone to get started soon,” she said. “Really soon.”
“Don’t worry,” one of the participants assured her. “Nobody’s got any travel plans.”
What none of the participants discussed was a longer-range prospect: using CRISPR to engineer inheritable edits in humans that would make our children, and all of our descendants, less vulnerable to virus infections. These genetic improvements could permanently alter the human race.
“That’s in the realm of science fiction,” Doudna said dismissively when I raised the topic after the meeting. Yes, I agreed, it’s a bit like Brave New World or Gattaca. But as with any good science fiction, elements have already come true. In November 2018, a young Chinese scientist who had been to some of Doudna’s gene-editing conferences used CRISPR to edit embryos and remove a gene that produces a receptor for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It led to the birth of twin girls, the world’s first “designer babies.”
There was an immediate outburst of awe and then shock. Arms flailed, committees convened. After more than three billion years of evolution of life on this planet, one species (us) had developed the talent and temerity to grab control of its own genetic future. There was a sense that we had crossed the threshold into a whole new age, perhaps a brave new world, like when Adam and Eve bit into the apple or Prometheus snatched fire from the gods.
Our newfound ability to make edits to our genes raises some fascinating questions. Should we edit our species to make us less susceptible to deadly viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! Right? Should we use gene editing to eliminate dreaded disorders, such as Huntington’s, sickle-cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis? That sounds good, too. And what about deafness or blindness? Or being short? Or depressed? Hmmm . . . How should we think about that? A few decades from now, if it becomes possible and safe, should we allow parents to enhance the IQ and muscles of their kids? Should we let
them decide eye color? Skin color? Height?
Whoa! Let’s pause for a moment before we slide all of the way down this slippery slope. What might that do to the diversity of our societies? If we are no longer subject to a random natural lottery when it comes to our endowments, will it weaken our feelings of empathy and acceptance? If these offerings at the genetic supermarket aren’t free (and they won’t be), will that greatly increase inequality—and indeed encode it permanently in the human race? Given these issues, should such decisions be left solely to individuals, or should society as a whole have some say? Perhaps we should develop some rules.
By “we” I mean we. All of us, including you and me. Figuring out if and when to edit our genes will be one of the most consequential questions of the twenty-first century, so I thought it would be useful to understand how it’s done. Likewise, recurring waves of virus epidemics make it important to understand the life sciences. There’s a joy that springs from fathoming how something works, especially when that something is ourselves. Doudna relished that joy, and so can we. That’s what this book is about.
The invention of CRISPR and the plague of COVID will hasten our transition to the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions arose from the discovery, beginning just over a century ago, of the three fundamental kernels of our existence: the atom, the bit, and the gene.
The first half of the twentieth century, beginning with Albert Einstein’s 1905 papers on relativity and quantum theory, featured a revolution driven by physics. In the five decades following his miracle year, his theories led to atom bombs and nuclear power, transistors and spaceships, lasers and radar.
The second half of the twentieth century was an information-technology era, based on the idea that all information could be encoded by binary digits—known as bits—and all logical processes could be performed by circuits with on-off switches. In the 1950s, this led to the development of the microchip, the computer, and the internet. When these three innovations were combined, the digital revolution was born.
Now we have entered a third and even more momentous era, a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code.
When Doudna was a graduate student in the 1990s, other biologists were racing to map the genes that are coded by our DNA. But she became more interested in DNA’s less-celebrated sibling, RNA. It’s the molecule that actually does the work in a cell by copying some of the instructions coded by the DNA and using them to build proteins. Her quest to understand RNA led her to that most fundamental question: How did life begin? She studied RNA molecules that could replicate themselves, which raised the possibility that in the stew of chemicals on this planet four billion years ago they started to reproduce
even before DNA came into being.
As a biochemist at Berkeley studying the molecules of life, she focused on figuring out their structure. If you’re a detective, the most basic clues in a biological whodunit come from discovering how a molecule’s twists and folds determine the way it interacts with other molecules. In Doudna’s case, that meant studying the structure of RNA. It was an echo of the work Rosalind Franklin had done with DNA, which was used by James Watson and Francis Crick to discover the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953. As it happens, Watson, a complex figure, would weave in and out of Doudna’s life.
Doudna’s expertise in RNA led to a call from a biologist at Berkeley who was studying the CRISPR system that bacteria developed in their battle against viruses. Like a lot of basic science discoveries, it turned out to have practical applications. Some were rather ordinary, such as protecting the bacteria in yogurt cultures. But in 2012 Doudna and others figured out a more earth-shattering use: how to turn CRISPR into a tool to edit genes.
CRISPR is now being used to treat sickle-cell anemia, cancers, and blindness. And in 2020, Doudna and her teams began exploring how CRISPR could detect and destroy the coronavirus. “CRISPR evolved in bacteria because of their long-running war against viruses,” Doudna says. “We humans don’t have time to wait for our own cells to evolve natural resistance to this virus, so we have to use our ingenuity to do that. Isn’t it fitting that one of the tools is this ancient bacterial immune system called CRISPR? Nature is beautiful that way.” Ah, yes. Remember that phrase: Nature is beautiful. That’s another theme of this book.
There are other star players in the field of gene editing. Most of them deserve to be the focus of biographies or perhaps even movies. (The elevator pitch: A Beautiful Mind meets Jurassic Park.) They play important roles in this book, because I want to show that science is a team sport. But I also want to show the impact that a persistent, sharply inquisitive, stubborn, and edgily competitive player can have. With a smile that sometimes (but not always) masks the wariness in her eyes, Jennifer Doudna turned out to be a great central character. She has the instincts to be collaborative, as any scientist must, but ingrained in her character is a competitive streak, which most great innovators have. With her emotions usually carefully controlled, she wears her star status lightly.
Her life story—as a researcher, Nobel Prize winner, and public policy thinker—connects the CRISPR tale to some larger historical threads, including the role of women in science. Her work also illustrates, as Leonardo da Vinci’s did, that the key to innovation is connecting a curiosity about basic science to the practical work of devising tools that can be applied to our lives—moving discoveries from lab bench to bedside.
By telling her story, I hope to give an up-close look at how science works. What actually happens in a lab? To what extent do discoveries depend on individual genius, and to what extent has teamwork become more critical? Has the competition for prizes and patents undermined collaboration?
Most of all, I want to convey the importance of basic science, meaning quests that are curiosity-driven rather than application-oriented. Curiosity-driven research into the wonders of nature plants the seeds, sometimes in unpredictable ways, for later innovations.3 Research about surface-state physics eventually led to the transistor and microchip. Likewise, studies of an astonishing method that bacteria use to fight off viruses eventually led to a gene-editing tool and techniques that humans can use in their own struggle against viruses.
It is a story filled with the biggest of questions, from the origins of life to the future of the human race. And it begins with a sixth-grade girl who loved searching for “sleeping grass” and other fascinating phenomena amid the lava rocks of Hawaii, coming home from school one day and finding on her bed a detective tale about the people who discovered what they proclaimed to be, with only a little exaggeration, “the secret of life.”
Product details
- ASIN : B08MFT5J95
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster Australia (March 9, 2021)
- Publication date : March 9, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 55202 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 533 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,116,419 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #799 in Biographies of Scientists
- #2,729 in Science & Math (Kindle Store)
- #3,058 in Scientist Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Walter Isaacson is writing a biography of Elon Musk. He is the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race; Leonardo da Vinci; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution; and Kissinger: A Biography. He is also the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He is a Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine.
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One cannot understand the power of the discoveries that Dr. Doudna made, supervised, and collaborated on without having at least a basic understanding of the science, challenges and personalities involved in the discoveries. But not everyone can write such a book.
This is a well written book that was well worth the hours spent in engaging with the material, as well as reading the story.
I would note that the book is at least somewhat technical, given that the subject is highly technical, so keep that in mind as you consider the read. Part of the skill of the author was to be able to tell the story, including the detail, in a way that remained readable all the way through.
Although the main character of the book is Jennifer Doudna, the account of her journey in the discovery of CRISPR-Cas 9 involves a cast of amazing group of colleagues, collaborators and competitors. Foremost among them are her main collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier and her main competitor Feng Zhang. Other interesting personalities include several scientists in her lab at Berkeley, Director of the MIT Broad Institute Eric Lander, Professor George Church of Harvard, to name just a few. Then there is the Chinese doctor He Jiankui, whose project on CRISPR babies Nana and Lulu brought him jail instead of glory, and the colorful biohacker Josiah Zayner, who wanted to demonstrate on YouTube how easy CRISPR is and to inspire people to do that at home.
The color photos throughout the book add to the liveliness of their stories.
The stories told in the book illustrate many characteristics common to scientists – ambitious, competitive, eager to be first and eager to be recognized, occasional selfishness but also capable of generosity. It is touching to see that, in fighting Covid 19, rival teams come together to collaborate and they made their findings freely available to the community instead of fighting for patents. It is timely to learn that the Covid mRNA vaccines developed is directly the result of the research that led to CRISPR.
Above all, scientists are driven by curiosity and the beauty of nature. Both the book and the author’s TV interviews cited Jennifer’s curiosity as a little girl growing up in Hilo, Hawaii, wondering why the fernlike leaves of “sleeping grass” curl up when touched. There was no mention in the book whether Jennifer found the biological mechanism which led to the leaves folding. It would be nice to add a sentence or two to explain the reason (for the un-initiated).
The scientists in the story are also keenly aware of the consequences of their discoveries to society and mankind. There were several conferences devoted to discuss the ethical and moral problems concerning gene-editing. Attempts were made to formulate guidelines in conducting future research, without noticeable success. The author presents a number of thought experiments to illustrate the complexity of these issues, which centered around under what circumstances is it ethical and moral to intervene with gene-editing. If it is up to me, I would say that absolute medical necessity and getting rid of unbearable suffering should be the main, if not the sole criteria.
The book ends with two moving stories, one joyful and one sad. The joyful one involves the reconciliation of Jennifer and Emmanuelle, who had drifted apart after their Nobel prize winning Discovery, due to differences in personality. The sad one concerns James Watson, who was ostracized by his own Institution, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, for saying racially insensitive things.
There are memorable and provocative quotes in the book, two of which are given below:
“If man wants to play God, he has to first learn to be man.” - author unknown
“If scientists don’t play God, who will?” - James Watson
Finally, the author is to be complimented that, while he studied almost everything under the sun (history, literature, politics, philosophy and economics) in college, except science, he was able to guide the reader through the jungle of DNA, RNA, CRISPR, CAS, CARVER, PAC-MAN, etc. Most amazing of all, he even learned to use CRASPR-cas9 to edit.
But you might laugh too if you read that quote in, "The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race" (CB), at least if you replace A and B with a couple of defined groups in America. A couple of groups that are not only disparate but disparaged as well. I'll admit I laughed, even though I guess I'm a member of group B. But then again, I have been occasionally accused of having a sense of humor, although not too often as that would be unseemly. But a sense of humor is something that unfortunately seems to be in short supply nowadays, unlike researchers racing to write papers to beat their competitors in order to win a Nobel Prize. And things like that.
But that off-the-record quote I believe came from James Watson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his and his partner Francis Crick's academic paper proposing a double-helix structure for DNA. Mr. Watson has made other so-called "controversial statements" that have taken him even more out of favor, supposedly. Now, I will admit that some of Mr. Watson's assertions have probably crossed the line, but what made me more upset than anything he's ever said: the so-called "Scientific Community's" response to those assertions. When someone makes an assertion that you don't like, instead of, oh, using an ad hominem attack against the person, or simply dismissing him without thought, here's an idea: create an experiment that either proves or disproves that assertion, run that experiment, and then publish the results. And maybe get lucky enough to even change his or her mind. What a novel idea! Although changing one's mind is maybe even rarer than a sense of humor. Ahem.
Currently the number-one review for CB, which gives a 3-star rating, was written by someone who knows a lot about biology and DNA and RNA and all of that stuff, surely more than I do, and he even admits that he's not a member of the "target market" for CB. Fair enough. I think that he has a point giving CB only three stars although for me, if I am going to complain about CB, I might write that it can be a bit of a slog. There are moments where I was really intrigued, there were moments where I was downright bored -- there were more repeats in ideas in CB than repeats in CRISPR -- and there were, once again, moments where I actually laughed out loud. Literally. And I rarely use the word literally. As my German professor in college once opined, "'Literally' means literally nothing." That drew a laugh from me as well, come to think of it, especially since English wasn't his first language.
But while I am giving CB a fairly good review score it doesn't mean that I always liked it. As a matter of fact, one thing that really bothered me while reading: I had a hard time finding anyone featured in the book that I found to be -- how should I write? -- a "sympathetic character." I took a few Drama classes in college, mostly to fulfill some liberal arts requirements for an unrelated science degree, and the professor said something like, "If you're going to write a screenplay, you'd better create at least one character that the audience can root for." I'll begrudgingly admit I had one in CB: Jo Zayner. Now Mr. Zayner is a controversial figure, maybe even more controversial than Mr. Watson if that's possible. Mr. Zayner takes some zany risks is all that I will write. But you get the feeling that he's looking out for the "little guy." The rest of the characters in CB seem to talk a good game -- "We're doing what we do because we want to help people! Yay!" -- but I simply didn't buy a word of it. After all there is more infighting in the CRISPR world than in "Survivor."
I've read quite a few books now from the author of CB, Walter Isaacson: "Steve Jobs." "Elon Musk." "The Code Breaker" obviously. And right after I finished CB I downloaded a sample of "Leonardo Da Vinci" (LDV), read a chapter, then bought it. I'm reading LDV right now as a matter of fact. I will write that, while I'm not as big of a fan of Mr. Isaacson as I am of Richard Preston, the author of, "The Hot Zone," and many other terrific reads, I still am a fan of Mr. Isaacson nonetheless. Mr. Isaacson is an excellent author, particularly of biographies. But I'll admit, while reading, I just kept thinking that the people who got the most credit for CRISPR maybe shouldn't have. Unlike that other reviewer I don't know anyone in the book but I get the feeling that Emmanuelle Charpentier was the person who maybe should've gotten the most credit. After all she went to Jennifer Doudna in San Juan, PR during a conference with the initial basic idea, I believe. And there was a graduate student much earlier -- I forget his name evidently just like the committee for the Nobel Prize -- who seemed to be the first person who noticed repeat DNA sequences that started it all. Why didn't he get some kind of award? You've got me.
But alas, one can and may like a book and dislike most of the characters. After all, when reviewing a book, in my opinion you really should mostly review it from the perspective of: did the author do a good or even great job with his writing? If so, well, maybe you'll give that book a 4-star rating instead of a 3-star rating. I will admit I hemmed and hawed over what review score I should give, "The Code Breaker," though.
Top reviews from other countries
taken with the author, the way he has of being somehow able to know how to do as he does. The
knowledge, his abilities, to keep everything straight, everything aligned; to get close to his subjects,
their who and as they are, yet still be able to keep, to have, to hold in mind his own thoughts and
perspectives on. He is an amazing author, letting us get to know more well those he is writing about,
while at the same time, letting us be aware of his views, his thoughts and thinking. I had read one of his previous books, a book on Albert Einstein, a book I would never have seen myself as reading and
enjoying as much as I did, and now this one. I have to see it as being because of, or due to the author
being so wonderfully naturally gifted. I thank the author, I thank Amazon and I thank the person, the people who brought the book to my door. G Matheson
Writing is simple, flow is very natural and it is about so close in the past that it feels exciting to know it all happened all around us.
A lot of work needs to be done and it means that unemployment can be eradicated if the potential from this science is seized.