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

by Walter Isaacson

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.”