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

by Walter Isaacson

The invention of easily reprogrammable RNA vaccines was a lightning-fast triumph of human ingenuity, but it was based on decades of curiosity-driven research into one of the most fundamental aspects of life on planet earth: how genes encoded by DNA are transcribed into snippets of RNA that tell cells what proteins to assemble. Likewise, CRISPR gene-editing technology came from understanding the way that bacteria use snippets of RNA to guide enzymes to chop up dangerous viruses. Great inventions come from understanding basic science. Nature is beautiful that way.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was founded in 1890 based on a belief in the magic of in-person meetings. The formula is to attract interesting people to an idyllic locale and provide them with opportunities to interact, including at a nice bar. The beauty of nature and the joy that comes from unstructured human engagement is a powerful combination. Even when they don’t interact—such as when an awed young Jennifer Doudna passes the aging icon Barbara McClintock on a path through the Cold Spring Harbor campus—people benefit from an atmosphere that is charged in a way that sparks creativity. One of the transformations wrought by the coronavirus pandemic is that more meetings in the future will be done virtually. It’s a shame. If COVID doesn’t kill us, Zoom will. As Steve Jobs emphasized when he built a headquarters for Pixar and planned a new Apple campus, new ideas are born out of serendipitous encounters. In-person interactions are especially important in the initial brainstorming of new ideas and the forging of personal bonds. As Aristotle taught, we are a social animal, an instinct that cannot fully be satisfied online. Nevertheless, there will be an upside to the fact that the coronavirus has expanded how we work together and share ideas. By hastening the Age of Zoom, the pandemic will broaden the horizons of scientific collaboration, allowing it to be even more global and crowdsourced. A walk along the cobblestone streets of San Juan was the catalyst for the collaboratio...

Curiosity is the key trait of the people who have fascinated me, from Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci. Curiosity drove James Watson and the Phage Group, who wanted to understand the viruses that attack bacteria, and the Spanish graduate student Francisco Mojica, who was intrigued by clustered repeated sequences of DNA, and Jennifer Doudna, who wanted to understand what made the sleeping grass curl up when you touched it. And maybe that instinct—curiosity, pure curiosity—is what will save us.

From my balcony, I marveled at the diversity of the passing humanity. There were people short and tall, gay and straight and trans, fat and skinny, light and dark and café au lait. I saw a cluster wearing Gallaudet University T-shirts excitedly using sign language. The supposed promise of CRISPR is that we may someday be able to pick which of these traits we want in our children and in all of our descendants. We could choose for them to be tall and muscular and blond and blue-eyed and not deaf and not—well, pick your preferences. As I surveyed the scene with all of its natural variety, I pondered how this promise of CRISPR might also be its peril. It took nature millions of years to weave together three billion base pairs of DNA in a complex and occasionally imperfect way to permit all of the wondrous diversity within our species. Are we right to think we can now come along and edit that genome to eliminate what we see as imperfections? Will we lose our diversity? Our humility and empathy? Will we become less flavorful, like our tomatoes?