The Code Breaker

by Walter Isaacson

For example, almost every champion runner has what is known as the R allele of the ACTN3 gene. It produces a protein that builds fast-twitch muscle fibers, and it is also associated with improving strength and recovery from muscle injury.8 Someday it may be possible to edit this variation of the ACTN3 gene into the DNA of your kids. Would that be unfair? Is it unfair that some kids are born with it naturally? Why is one more unfair than the other?

they aren’t just imagining that. DARPA already has a project going, in conjunction with Doudna’s lab, to study how to create genetically enhanced soldiers.

In fact, even if only a portion of the population became smarter, it might benefit everyone in society. Memory may be the first mental improvement we will be able to engineer, and fortunately it is a less fraught topic than IQ. It has already been improved in mice, such as by enhancing the genes for NMDA receptors in nerve cells. In humans, enhancing those genes could help prevent memory loss in old age, but it could also enhance memory in younger people as well.14

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.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. —Steve Jobs, Apple’s “Think Different” ad, 1997

Viruses are deceptively simple little capsules of bad news.I They are just a tiny bit of genetic material, either DNA or RNA, inside a protein shell. When they worm their way into a cell of an organism, they can hijack its machinery in order to replicate themselves. In the case of coronaviruses, the genetic material is RNA, Doudna’s specialty. In SARS-CoV-2, the RNA is about 29,900 base letters long, compared to more than three billion in human DNA. The viral sequence provides the code for making a mere twenty-nine proteins.

The protein looks like a spike, which gives the virus, when viewed through an electron microscope, the appearance of a crown, hence corona.

The COVID pandemic that killed more than 1.5 million people in 2020 will not be the final plague. However, thanks to the new RNA vaccine technology, our defenses against most future viruses are likely to be immensely faster and more effective.