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

by Walter Isaacson

By limiting gene edits to those that are truly “medically necessary,” she says, we can make it less likely that parents could seek to “enhance” their children, which she feels is morally and socially wrong.

“As long as we are correcting genetic mutations by restoring the ‘normal’ version of the gene—not inventing some wholly new enhancement not seen in the average human genome—we’re likely to be on the safe side.”

When the talk turns from science to the ethical issues hovering over CRISPR, most of the diners agree that, when it’s safe and practical, genetic editing—even making inheritable edits in the human germline—ought to be used if necessary to fix bad single-gene mutations, such as Huntington’s disease and sickle-cell anemia. But they recoil at the idea of using gene editing for human enhancements, such as trying to give our kids more muscle mass or height or perhaps someday higher IQ and cognitive skills.

A looming ethical issue, everyone at the table agrees, is that gene editing could exacerbate, and even encode, inequality in society. “Should rich people be allowed to buy the best genes they can afford?”

“If you don’t want to make it all from scratch, you can just buy the Cas9 from companies like IDT on the web. You can even buy the guide RNAs. If you want to edit genes, it’s easy to order the components online.”

The IDT website advertises “all of the reagents needed for successful genome editing,” with kits designed for delivery into human cells beginning at $95. Over at a site called GeneCopoeia, a Cas9 protein with a nuclear location signal starts at $85.)

But if there were no patents, there might be less payoff for racing to be the first to devise methods of enhancements, and those that did get invented might be cheaper and more widely available if anyone could copy them. “I would accept some slowdown in the science in return for making it more equitable,” he says.

“My strength is not that I am smarter, it’s that I’m more willing to offend the crowd.”

Pfizer with the German company BioNTech. It was a new type of vaccine that had never before been deployed. Instead of delivering deactivated components of the targeted virus, like traditional vaccines do, it injects into humans a snippet of RNA.

Vaccines work by stimulating a person’s immune system. A substance that resembles a dangerous virus (or any other pathogen)I is delivered into a person’s body. That substance could be a deactivated version of the virus or a safe fragment of the virus or genetic instructions to make that fragment. This is intended to kick the person’s immune system into gear.

Vaccines use a variety of methods to try to stimulate the human immune system. One traditional approach is to inject a weakened and safe (attenuated) version of the virus.

Jonas Salk succeeded with an approach that seemed somewhat safer: using a killed virus.

Another traditional approach is to inject a subunit of the virus, such as one of the proteins that are on the virus’s coat. The immune system will then remember these, allowing the body to mount a quick and robust response when it encounters the actual virus.

Many companies pursued this approach in the 2020 race for a COVID vaccine by developing ways to introduce into human cells the spike protein that is on the surface of the coronavirus.

The plague year of 2020 is likely to be remembered as the time when these traditional vaccines began to be supplanted by genetic vaccines. Instead of injecting a weakened or partial version of the dangerous virus into humans, these new vaccines deliver a gene or piece of genetic coding that will guide human cells to produce, on their own, components of the virus. The goal is for these components to stimulate the patient’s immune system. One method for doing this is by taking a harmless virus and engineering into it a gene that will make the desired component.

There is another way to get genetic material into a human cell and cause it to produce the components of a virus that can stimulate the immune system. Instead of engineering the gene for the component into a virus, you can just deliver the genetic code for the component—as DNA or RNA—into human cells. The cells thus become a vaccine-manufacturing facility.

the pandemic had accelerated the convergence of science with other fields.

“base editing,” which can make a precise change in a single letter in DNA without cutting a break in the strands.

“prime editing,” in which a guide RNA can carry a long sequence to be edited into a targeted segment of DNA. It requires making only a tiny nick in the DNA rather than a double-strand break. Edits of up to eighty letters are possible.2 “If CRISPR-Cas9 is like scissors and base editors are like pencils, then you can think of prime editors as like word processors,” Liu explained.

October 9, 2020,

Until 2020, only five women, beginning with Marie Curie in 1911, had won a Nobel for chemistry, out of 184 honorees.

George Church says he had long wondered whether there would ever be a biological event that was catalytic enough to bring science into our daily lives. “COVID is it,”

in August 2020, applications to medical school had jumped seventeen percent from the previous year.

All of the scientists I write about in this book say that their main motivation is not money, or even glory, but the chance to unlock the mysteries of nature and use those discoveries to make the world a better place.

CRISPR could provide that to us, as it does for bacteria. It could also someday be used to fix genetic problems, defeat cancers, enhance our children, and allow us to hack evolution so that we can steer the future of the human race.

Nature and nature’s God, in their infinite wisdom, have evolved a species that is able to modify its own genome, and that species happens to be ours.