While Doudna may have been building the novel world of RNA science and while feminism was beginning to make its mark in socio-political discourse, structural and systemic barriers faced even brilliant and fearless women such as Doudna, as described by Isaacson. As remarked by Isaacson, few were aware of the pivotal role of Rosalind Franklin in its discovery. Yet, already then, the Crick-Watson discovery of DNA’s double helix was reverberating in the world of science. The enriched program we were enrolled in was as unconventional and fun as our respective careers turned out to be. One of Doudna’s first mentors and a Nobel prize winner himself, Jack Szostak (Harvard University), was in my homeroom class in Riverdale High School in Montreal, Quebec. In 2020, Doudna and French researcher Emmanuelle Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on the CRISPR gene editing technology. In 2012, Doudna and her UC Berkeley colleagues made a breakthrough that revolutionized the process of editing genomic DNA based on the discovery and development of CRISPR (acronym for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”). Fuelled by the gene for curiosity, which has yet to be mapped and sequenced, its multiple expressions are found in this brilliant book. As described and interpreted so vividly and engagingly by Walter Isaacson, the high-octane world of academia, its pleasures (students/research teams), perils (funding) and prizes/patents (rare), sounds more intoxicating than the reality of non-stop slogging, publishing and conferencing. While I am an international biotech policy wonk and not a basic scientist, the credo of “know your subject matter” before pronouncing (or denouncing) scientific breakthroughs, has meant that the last 43 years of my academic life have been spent in the exciting, competitive and somewhat terrifying world of “rocket science” – the very trajectory of Jennifer Doudna. Little did I know that it would be an enjoyable journey down memory lane. The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human RaceĬonsidering its length at 480 pages, biographic nature (not usually my bag), and intimidating, heraldic title: The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and the Future of the Human Race b y Walter Isaacson, it was with some trepidation that I accepted to review this tome.
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