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

by Walter Isaacson

The reluctance to play God can also be understood in a more secular way. As one Catholic theologian said at a National Academy of Medicine panel, “When I hear someone say that we shouldn’t play God, I’d guess that ninety percent of the time they are atheists.” The argument can simply mean that we should not have the hubris to believe that we should fiddle with the awesome, mysterious, delicately interwoven, and beautiful forces of nature. “Evolution has been working toward optimizing the human genome for 3.85 billion years,” says NIH director Francis Collins, who is not an atheist. “Do we really think that some small group of human genome tinkerers could do better without all sorts of unintended consequences?”