IS THE GENE EDITING GENIE OUT OF ITS BOTTLE?
When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, her dad gave her a copy of “The Double Helix,” James Watson’s account of the discovery of the structure of DNA. Realizing that researchers could find out “how and why things worked at the most fundamental and inner level,” she decided to become a scientist. “Girls don’t do science,” a high school guidance counselor warned her. The advice only stiffened her resolve.
In 2020 Ms. Doudna and her collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats), a gene editing tool.
In “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and the Future of the Human Race,” Walter Isaacson, a professor of history at Tulane University, former editor at Time, chair of CNN, CEO of the Aspen Institute, author of “The Innovators” and biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, and Steve Jobs, tells Ms. Doudna’s story.
Mr. Isaacson explains CRISPR in terms readers can understand and its role in eliminating diseases, including sickle-cell anemia, Huntington’s Chorea and Coronaviruses, while illuminating the collaborative, competitive and sometimes petty culture of research scientists. He also asks probing questions about the moral implications of the life sciences revolution.
“The Code Breaker” is an indispensable guide to the brave — and scary — new world we have entered.
Mr. Isaacson helps us understand the sequencing of DNA, the world’s most famous molecule, by Mr. Watson, Francis Crick and others, which taught scientists how to read the code of life. And the momentous shift to learning how to write that code, which involved RNA (“it’s less famous sibling”), the carrier of genetic instructions. In a race against Feng Zhang, her principal rival, Ms. Doudna identified CRISPR associated enzymes “that enable the system to cut and paste new memories of viruses that attack the bacteria.” Ms. Doudna then created short segments of RNA that guided the enzyme to a dangerous virus where it could chop out a gene and insert new material that confers an adaptive immunity.
As He Jiankui, the rogue Chinese researcher who “made” the world’s first genetically enhanced baby (actually twin girls), demonstrated, Mr. Isaacson notes, that CRISPR technology “is on the verge of becoming easy enough that it will not be confined to well-regulated labs.” Like computer scientists (and hackers), bioengineers no longer have clear lines separating professional codersfrom amateurs.
“The Code Breaker” is at its best when Mr. Isaacson conducts thought experiments to assess the moral implications of gene editing. Like Ms. Doudna, it is clear, Mr. Isaacson is in favor of somatic editing — i.e., changes in the targeted cells of living patients that do not affect reproductive cells and therefore have no permanent impact on the species. He also advocates defining responsible pathways for clinical uses of heritable genome editing. That said, Mr. Isaacson does not support leaving it to individual choice and the free market.
Distinctions between “treatment” to fix dangerous genetic abnormalities and “enhancement” to improve human capacities, Mr. Isaacson points out, can be blurry. When do modifications to address genetic predispositions or predeterminations for a child to be short or obese, to have attention deficits or be depressive, for example, cross the line from treatment to enhancement? What about “prevention” of HIV, coronavirus or cancer? Or “super enhancements,” like the ability to see infrared light (a skill DARPA, the
Pentagon’s research agency, is already studying) or avoid the bone, muscle or memory loss associated with old age? And Mr. Isaacson wonders whether a deaf couple, who want to preserve their subculture, should have a right to request for their child an embryo edited to be deaf?
More generally, Mr. Isaacson claims that allowing prospective parents to purchase genes for the physical and cognitive characteristics of their kids “would represent a true quantum leap in inequality.” Equally dangerous is the distinct possibility that a liberal or libertarian genetics of individual choice would lead — “as surely as government-controlled eugenics” — to a less diverse, creative, inspired and edgy society. Like any species, Mr. Isaacson points out, diversity and randomness enhance resilience in the gene pool.
The genie is out of the bottle, the author concludes. And so, starting now, we must do the hard work to strike a balance between the Promethean quest to master nature and the environment and “submission to the vagaries of a lottery.” It won’t be easy.