Unlocking the Future: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Impact on Humanity

a historical fiction writer: the author did a good job as long as he stayed with what happened. It was quite interesting. Occasionally he could not resist making comments about Watson and those comments, while well meaning, simply indicated he did not know anything about the literature in this field. He contributed to the general effort to keep people from taking any unpopular and forbidden opinions to the public. Stating the "correct" opinion is not really the same thing as offering counter evidence, if it exists. That mentality did make the reader wonder about some of the other material in the book.

United States on Sep 15, 2023

C.G.: After the read, a few years, of the biography of Albert Einstein by the same author, I was very expecting to read this book. But it's a bit deceiving ... a large part of the book is about the rivalries between several researchers (Jennifer Douda & Emmanuelle Charpentier who won the Nobel Prize and some others from different labs), looks like the jungle ... Another chapter is about the ethical applications of CRISPR, that is not a strength of the author.
I missed very much the suspense & ryhm of the Einstein biography. There might be better books about Jennifer Douda, and more generally about this crucial new biotechnolody.

France on Aug 31, 2023

Gail Matheson: This book is so interesting. I am just so glad I am a reader, that I am able to be reading it. I am so
taken with the author, the way he has of being somehow able to know how to do as he does. The
knowledge, his abilities, to keep everything straight, everything aligned; to get close to his subjects,
their who and as they are, yet still be able to keep, to have, to hold in mind his own thoughts and
perspectives on. He is an amazing author, letting us get to know more well those he is writing about,
while at the same time, letting us be aware of his views, his thoughts and thinking. I had read one of his previous books, a book on Albert Einstein, a book I would never have seen myself as reading and
enjoying as much as I did, and now this one. I have to see it as being because of, or due to the author
being so wonderfully naturally gifted. I thank the author, I thank Amazon and I thank the person, the people who brought the book to my door. G Matheson

Canada on Aug 22, 2023

Jacques G.: I purchased the Kindle version of this book.

This book gives a laymen's view of what CRISPR is, how it was discovered, the technology that preceded it and how it works. The ethical aspects of the use of the technology is of great interest.

Some of my thoughts on the applications: The African Cheetah experienced a genetic bottle neck when at some time in the distant past, an event wiped out most of them leaving only a few individuals to repopulate the species. The Persian Cheetah left Africa at a time which preceded this event and they do not have this genetic bottleneck. It should be possible to re-introduce genetic diversity to the African Cheetah with the Persian Cheetah. If the two species cannot naturally mate, then this technology could help the process.

Similarly, the American Buffalo was nearly wiped out in the 19th century. The former sites of Buffalo jumps could contain bones and teeth which could be used to reintroduce genetic diversification to the remaining population to increase its resistance to disease. In the melting permafrost in North America there are hunting grounds that are tens of thousands of years old which have frozen feces from...

Canada on Apr 28, 2022

LA in Dallas: The first thing that struck me as I began reading The Code Breaker was "I know these people!" Note 6 in chapter 4 ("The education of a biochemist") especially brought this home to me:

"6. Sharon Panasenko, “Methylation of Macromolecules during Development in Myxococcus xanthus,” Journal of Bacteriology, Nov. 1985"

I knew Sharon Panasenko. She and I overlapped in the close-knit Stanford Biochemistry Department, and after she left we were both members of the small community of myxobacteria researchers. It is even possible that I met Jennifer Doudna around this time, when I was a Stanford grad student and she a Pomona College chemistry undergrad in Sharon's lab. The book is full of names familiar to me, known to me by reputation or in a few cases personally. The only major player in the CRISPR story I know personally is Eric Lander. (By "know personally" I mean we worked in the same lab and had multiple conversations.) But I also know several of the minor players and have met and spoken with many of the older participants.

Doudna (whom I have never met) seems a quite familiar type of scientist to me. Although she is clearly an extraordinary biologist, there...

United States on Feb 13, 2022

Serghiou Const: For the first time in the evolution of life on this planet, a species (Homo sapiens) developed the capacity to edit its own genetic make up. It is now possible to carry out genome modifications in the germline that is in sperms, eggs and early stage embryos, thereby altering the genetic make up of every differentiated cell with the result that these changes will be passed on to the organism's progeny and all subsequent generations. It is only prudent that we now pause until the societal, ethical and philosophical implications of germline editing are properly and thoroughly discussed. I wish, however, to clarify that there has already been general acceptance of somatic editing that is changes that are made in targeted cells of a living patient and do not affect reproductive cells. If something goes wrong in these therapies, it can be disastrous for the individual but not the species.

The book covers, in chronological order, a time span of 160 years from Darwin's publication 'On the Origin of Species' in 1859 to the development of mRNA vaccines against the coronavirus in 2020.

A fascinating aspect is that the book is not written in the abstract but through the...

United Kingdom on Nov 24, 2021

Hande Z: There are several books on CRISPR and genetic engineering published in 2020 and 2021. It is almost as if the writers were racing against each other the way the scientists from Berkeley (Doudna & Co) and Zhang (MIT/Harvard) raced against each other, first in determining how to use CRISPR to edit the human gene, and later, in the race to file the patent for the procedure.

This book is 481 pages long but is an easy and exhilarating book written by an experienced hand. Issacson, however, openly declares that he tells the story primarily from Jennifer Doudna’s point of view. He has done his best to be an impartial reporter and recorder of the story, yet it is obvious, and perhaps unavoidable, that some characters are cast in poorer light against Doudna, who Issacson shines the light of sainthood upon.

Before the race to discover how CRISPR might be used on human genes, they first have to discover CRISPR – the acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. As it appears, scientific discoveries are made a step at a time, almost always by different scientists. The Japanese Yoshizumi Ishino was the first to discover the repeat structures in a...

Singapore on May 24, 2021

Kai Lee: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 was awarded jointly to Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material." However, it was only after the publication of the book “Double Helix” by Watson in 1968 that DNA became a household word and the world came to realize that it had entered the biomolecular age. More than half of a century later, in 2020, the Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna “for the development of a method for genome editing” This time, it took only a few months for the book “The Code-Breaker” by science historian Walter Isaacson to be published. Irrespective whether the hard-to-pronounce gene cutter, “CRISPR-Cas9” will become a household word, there is hardly any doubt that “the future of the Human Race” (the subtitle of the book), is at stake.

Although the main character of the book is Jennifer Doudna, the account of her journey in the discovery of CRISPR-Cas 9 involves a cast of amazing group of colleagues, collaborators and competitors....

United States on Mar 18, 2021