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

by Walter Isaacson

The gene-editing tool that Doudna and others developed in 2012 is based on a virus-fighting trick used by bacteria, which have been battling viruses for more than a billion years. In their DNA, bacteria develop clustered repeated sequences, known as CRISPRs, that can remember and then destroy viruses that attack them.

The invention of CRISPR and the plague of COVID will hasten our transition to the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions arose from the discovery, beginning just over a century ago, of the three fundamental kernels of our existence: the atom, the bit, and the gene.

Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code.

CRISPR is now being used to treat sickle-cell anemia, cancers, and blindness.

the key to innovation is connecting a curiosity about basic science to the practical work of devising tools that can be applied to our lives—moving discoveries from lab bench to bedside.

I want to convey the importance of basic science, meaning quests that are curiosity-driven rather than application-oriented.

James Watson’s The Double Helix

In addition to the role of lucky naïf that he concocted as his own persona in the book, Watson’s other most interesting character is Rosalind Franklin, a structural biologist and crystallographer whose data he used without her permission.

Even though her school didn’t encourage girls to become scientists, she decided that is what she wanted to do.

Darwin and Wallace had a key trait that is a catalyst for creativity: they had wide-ranging interests and were able to make connections between different disciplines.

The easiest of these viruses to study are the ones that attack bacteria, and they were dubbed (remember the term, for it will reappear when we discuss the discovery of CRISPR) “phages,” which was short for “bacteriophages,” meaning bacteria-eaters.

Maurice Wilkins, a biochemist at King’s College London.

As Watson memorably put it in the opening sentence of The Double Helix, “I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.”

Franklin was a focused scientist, sensibly dressed. As a result she ran afoul of English academia’s fondness for eccentrics and its tendency to look at women through a sexual lens, attitudes apparent in Watson’s descriptions of her.

Watson and Crick soon got more of Franklin’s data. She had submitted to Britain’s Medical Research Council a report on her work, and a member of the council shared it with them. Although Watson and Crick had not exactly stolen Franklin’s findings, they had appropriated her work without her permission.

As Watson later admitted in a feeble attempt at graciousness, “Her past uncompromising statements on this matter thus reflected first-rate science, not the outpourings of a misguided feminist.”

The Nobel Prize was awarded in 1962 to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins. Franklin was not eligible because she had died in 1958, at age thirty-seven, of ovarian cancer, likely caused by her exposure to radiation.

If she had survived, the Nobel committee would have faced an awkward situation: each prize can be awarded to only three winners.

RNA interference was discovered in the 1990s, partly by researchers who were trying to make petunias more purple by juicing up the flower’s color genes. But the process ended up suppressing some of the genes, leading to mottled and speckled petunias.

RNA interference operates by deploying an enzyme known as “Dicer.” Dicer snips a long piece of RNA into short fragments. These little fragments can then embark on a search-and-destroy mission: they seek out a messenger RNA molecule that has matching letters, then they use a scissors-like enzyme to chop it up. The genetic information carried by that messenger RNA is thus silenced.

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. —Henri Poincaré, Science and Method, 1908

CRISPR, for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.”

“When you do curiosity-driven research, you never know what it may someday lead to,” Mojica says. “Something that’s basic can later have wide consequences.”

Women in science tend to be shy about promoting themselves, and that has serious costs. A study in 2019 of more than six million articles with women as the principal author showed that they are less likely to use self-promotional terms, such as “novel” and “unique” and “unprecedented,” to describe their findings. The trend is especially true for articles in the most prestigious journals, which almost by definition feature research that is groundbreaking. In the highest-impact journals that publish the most important cutting-edge research, women are 21 percent less likely to use positive and self-promotional words in describing their work. Partly as a result, their papers are cited approximately 10 percent less frequently.12

She did not exaggerate or overpromise. That offered many advantages, one of which was that people tended to underestimate her.

So his mother sent him to computer camp and, just to make sure he was wired for success, debate camp as well. It was the type of enhancement that privileged parents can do even without gene editing.

Each important science prize is given to a limited number of people (for the Nobel, the maximum is three in each field), so the awards do not reflect the full cast of players who contributed to a discovery. As a result, they can distort history and be a disincentive to collaboration, just like patents.

Women scientists and writers, aware of the injustice done to Rosalind Franklin in some of the histories of DNA, were especially incensed at Lander,

“We have become the latter-day Prometheus,” biologist Robert Sinsheimer declared, with no sign that he understood the Greek myth.

as with many such genes, there’s a complexity. People who get a copy of the gene from only one parent do not develop the disease, but they do develop immunity to most forms of malaria. In other words, the gene was (and in some places still is) useful, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Now that there are treatments for malaria, it’s less useful. But it is a reminder, when we think of messing with Mother Nature, that genes may play multiple roles and have evolutionary reasons for existing.