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

by Walter Isaacson

Her work also illustrates, as Leonardo da Vinci’s did, that 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’ve looked for opportunities where I can fill a niche where there aren’t too many other people with the same skill sets.”

“It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”

Szostak had a guiding principle: Never do something that a thousand other people are doing

in addition to taking risks by moving into new fields: Ask big questions

An essential quality of living things is that they have a method for creating more organisms akin to themselves: they can reproduce.

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

I once asked Steve Jobs what his best product was, thinking he would say the Macintosh or iPhone. Instead he said that creating great products is important, but what’s even more important is creating a team that can continually make such products.

science is most often advanced not by great leaps of discovery but by small steps.

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t! —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Almost every person in any saga tends to remember their own role as being a little more important than the other players see it. That’s true in our own lives. We recall vividly the brilliance of our own contributions to a discussion; we’re a bit hazier when recalling the contributions of others, or we tend to minimize their significance.

Scientific breakthroughs are rarely eureka moments,” he concluded. “They are typically ensemble acts, played out over a decade or more, in which the cast becomes part of something greater than what any one of them could do alone.”

Some academics feel that the Bayh-Dole Act cheats the public out of the proceeds from inventions funded with taxpayer money and distorts the way universities work. “Encouraged by a small number of patents that made huge sums, universities developed massive infrastructure to profit from their researchers,” argues Michael Eisen,

Therein lies one of the problem with patents: they prod people to be less generous in sharing credit.

Don’t fight over divvying up the proceeds until you finish robbing the stagecoach.

In the digital realm, there isn’t a clear line separating amateur from professional coders. The same might soon be true of bioengineers.

Silver’s work was important because it framed the issue as being about individual freedom and liberty in a market-based consumer society. “If democratic societies allow parents to buy environmental advantages for their children, how can they prohibit them from buying genetic advantages?” he prodded. “Americans would respond to any attempt at a ban with the question, ‘Why can’t I give my child beneficial genes that other children get naturally?’ ”

Challenges and so-called disabilities often build character, teach acceptance, and instill resilience. They may even be correlated to creativity.

Using gene editing to prevent disabilities may make society less diverse and creative. But does this give governments the right to tell parents they can’t use such technologies?

Ingenuity without wisdom is dangerous.

“We should allow selection for non-disease genes even if this maintains or increases social inequality,” he writes, specifically citing “genes for intelligence.”11

It stumbles upon and then cobbles together new features, sort of like what happened during the worst eras of Microsoft Office, rather than proceed with a master plan and end product in mind. Evolution’s primary guide is reproductive fitness—what traits might cause an organism to reproduce more—which means it permits, and perhaps even encourages, all sorts of plagues, including coronaviruses and cancers, that afflict an organism once its childbearing use is over.

Human history has been a quest—a very natural one—to master challenges that happen to us unbidden, be they pandemics or droughts or storms. Few of us would regard Alzheimer’s or Huntington’s to be a result of giftedness.

quote from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

old Chinese saying: When one place is in trouble, assistance comes from all quarters.

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.

more viral waves are likely to come, either from the current coronavirus or novel ones in the future, so we need more than just vaccines. Like bacteria, we need a system that can be easily adapted to destroy each new virus. 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.

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.

All creatures large and small use whatever tricks they can to survive, and so should we. It’s natural. Bacteria came up with a pretty clever virus-fighting technique, but it took them trillions of life cycles to do so. We can’t wait that long. We will have to combine our curiosity with our inventiveness to speed up the process.