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The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

  • Book
  • Mar 9, 2021
  • #Biography #Biology #NaturalScience #Biotechnology
Walter Isaacson
@WalterIsaacson
(Author)
www.goodreads.com
Hardcover
4.7/5 7.8k ratings
Hardcover Kindle Audiobook Paperback Audio cd
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4.36/5 7.8k ratings
3 Recommenders
5 Mentions
2 Collections
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. As she sped through the pages, she becam... Show More

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. 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 co-discovery 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.

(From Goodreads)

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Number of Pages: 536

ISBN: 1982115858

ISBN-13: 9781982115852

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Bill Gates @BillGates · Nov 22, 2021
  • Curated in 5 books I loved reading this year (2021)
David Sinclair @DavidSinclair · Aug 19, 2021
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Know the players. Excellent read. Science + biz on the world stage is often brutal
Bill Gates @BillGates · Nov 24, 2021
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I read a lot of great books this year. These were some of my favorites.
Steve Fleming @smfleming · May 21, 2022
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Half way through this wonderful book on Jennifer Douda and Crispr- part biography, part detective story and part paean to science
Bill Gates @BillGates · Nov 22, 2021
  • Curated in 5 books I loved reading
The CRISPR gene editing system is one of the coolest and perhaps most consequential scientific breakthroughs of the last decade. I’m familiar with it because of my work at the foundation—we’re funding a number of projects that use the technology—but I still learned a lot from this comprehensive and accessible book about its discovery by Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues. Isaacson does a good job highlighting the most important ethical questions around gene editing.
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  • Bill Gates
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