A review by kurtwombat
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

challenging informative tense slow-paced

4.25

 
Mostly interesting, sometimes fascinating look at the birth and blossoming of the CRISPR gene editing technology. CRISPR promises to accelerate advancements in science the way AI suggests it might across all fields of technology (and that’s a book I want to read). Thankfully this book was written with non-science readers in mind—I was mostly able to follow the lab work with minimal re-reading—of course I’m not exactly prepared to write a dissertation (on not much of anything). The book focuses on one scientist, Jennifer Doudna, as an access point to the technology. This works well towards the beginning of the book but as more people hop on the CRISPR train, the biography part falls apart. The author warns at the beginning that several scientists involved in this work deserve their own books—this book would have been better served if CRISPR was considered the biographical center. With CRISPR always at the center such topics as the patent and ethics of use battles might not have felt like narrative stalling digressions. The timing of the book benefits from the Covid pandemic which offers another fascinating chapter—Doudna brought back into the narrative as someone working on the cutting edge of testing research. You can feel the author soft stepping around his sources to keep them talking—maybe this is just par for the course in covering such a topic or another downside to treating it like a biography. Well worth the read though some portions will require you to hunker down and push through to the next interesting topic.