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

by Walter Isaacson

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.

Now we have entered a third and even more momentous era, a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code.

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.

“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.”

Until then, one pound of insulin required eight thousand pounds of pancreas glands ripped from more than twenty-three thousand pigs or cows. Genentech’s success with insulin not only changed the lives of diabetics (and a lot of pigs and cows); it lifted the entire biotechnology industry into orbit.

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.

There was, however, one rival who did question Doudna’s haste: Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard. “She tells the Science editors that they have competition, she races the paper in, and Science rushes the reviewers,” he says. “The whole thing gets done in three weeks, and so she scoops the Lithuanians.”4 I find Lander’s implied criticism of Doudna interesting, even a bit amusing, because he is one of the most cheerfully competitive people I know. The fact that he and Doudna are both very comfortable with being competitive has, I suspect, made their rivalry more intense. But I also think it meant that they understood each other, in the way that the two rivals in C. P. Snow’s novel The Masters were able to understand each other better than any outsider could. Lander told me over dinner one night that he had the emails Doudna sent to the editors of Science that proved she pushed them to hurry her 2012 paper into print after she saw an abstract of Šikšnys’s paper. When I ask Doudna about this, she readily agrees that she told the editors of Science there was a paper being submitted to a competing journal and requested that the reviewers accelerate their process. “So what?” she says. “Ask Eric if he’s ever done that.” So the next time I have dinner with Lander, I tell him that Doudna wanted me to ask him that question. He pauses, laughs, and then merrily concedes, “Of course I have. It’s how science works. This is completely normal behavior.”

“My teacher loved enzymes,” Zhang says. “He told me that whenever you face a tough question in biology, just say ‘Enzymes.’ It’s the correct answer to most questions in biology.”

In Russia, there were no laws to prevent the use of gene editing in humans, and President Vladimir Putin in 2017 touted the potential of CRISPR. At a youth festival that year, he spoke of the benefits and dangers of creating genetically engineered humans, such as super-soldiers. “Man has the opportunity to get into the genetic code created by either nature, or as religious people would say, by God,” he said. “One may imagine that scientists could create a person with desired features. This may be a mathematical genius, an outstanding musician, but this can also be a soldier, a person who can fight without fear or compassion, mercy or pain.”

Such questions prompt us to look at “disabilities” and ask to what extent they are inherently disabling and to what extent the disadvantage is due to our social constructs and prejudices. The disadvantages from being deaf, for a human or any other animal, are very real. In contrast, any disadvantages to being gay or Black are due to social attitudes that can and should be changed. That is why we can make a moral distinction between using genetic techniques to prevent deafness and using these techniques to influence such things as skin color and sexual orientation.

Perhaps we will be able to improve our cognitive skills so that we can keep up with the challenges of using our technology wisely. Ah, but there’s the rub: wisely. Of all the complex components that go into human intelligence, wisdom may be the most elusive. Understanding the genetic components of wisdom may require us to understand consciousness, and I suspect that’s not going to happen in this century. In the meantime, we will have to deploy the finite allocation of wisdom that nature has dealt us as we ponder how to use the gene-editing techniques that we’ve discovered. Ingenuity without wisdom is dangerous.

Stemming from John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth century, this tradition recognizes that people will have different beliefs about what is good for their lives, and it argues that the state should give them a lot of liberty to make their own choices, as long as they do not harm others.

The dark side of our new information technology is not that it allows government repression of free speech but just the opposite: it permits anyone to spread, with little risk of being held accountable, any idea, conspiracy, lie, hatred, scam, or scheme, with the result that societies become less civil and governable.

Watson thus presents historians with what could be called the Jefferson Conundrum: To what extent can you respect a person for great achievements (“We hold these truths”) when they are accompanied by reprehensible failings (“are created equal”)?

At one point during my conversations with James Watson, when he veers toward the issue of race, Rufus bursts in from the kitchen shouting. “If you are going to let him say these things, then I am going to have to ask you to leave.” Watson merely shrugs and says nothing to his son, but he quits talking about race.

Adding to the disgrace was the fact that the World Health Organization had delivered 250,000 diagnostic tests that worked just fine to countries around the world. The U.S. could have gotten some of those tests or replicated them, but it had refused.

Molecules are becoming the new microchips.

about the use of GMOs in food, but it would be even better if more of them knew what a genetically modified organism is (and what the yogurt-makers discovered). It’s good to have strong opinions about gene engineering in humans, but it’s even better if you know what a gene is.