San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Biochemist is put under microscope
The newest biography from Walter Isaacson (“Steve Jobs,” “Leonardo Da Vinci”) bookends with the COVID19 pandemic, signaling the urgency and opportunity for biotechnology to shape our future. Although it is billed as a biography about Nobel Prizewinning scientist Jennifer Doudna, it turns out to be more about the powers of the scientific community and geneediting technology.
Doudna is one half of a team that won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering how CRISPR (short for clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) can be used to edit DNA with precision and speed, resulting in new therapies and the possibility of curing genetically inherited diseases — one of the most revolutionary biological discoveries since that of DNA.
Raised in Hawaii, the young Doudna found solace in nature when her whiteness made her feel isolated. Isaacson compares her to luminaries he has chronicled — “like many others who have felt like an outsider, she developed a wideranging curiosity about how we humans fit into creation.”
Doudna’s teachers discouraged her from science because of her gender, yet her life
changed when she read “The Double Helix” by James Watson about discovering the structure of DNA. In it was Rosalind Franklin, who, despite being overlooked for her contributions, gave Doudna the idea “that a woman could be a great scientist” and that you could “hunt for the reasons why nature worked the way it did,” which drove her to Harvard and then to UC Berkeley.
For a biography, “The Code Breaker” spends a lot of time focused on the people around Doudna, including her rivals. Doudna is interesting primarily for her work; as a person her presence is almost bland, and the book’s scenes are stolen by flashier characters and even by genes themselves. But perhaps it’s her exact lack of panache combined with her penchant for collaboration that result in her success. We tend to glorify individuals, but scientific discoveries often rely on collaboration and the previous research of those who never make it into the history books.
Isaacson excels when he evokes the frenzied speed at which scientists try to best their competition in publishing findings and filing for patents, teasing out the inextricable relationship between academic research and big biotech business. These fastpaced pages reveal pettiness when it comes to prizes and patents, despite the fact that the technology of those patents could save lives. It’s a sobering reminder that in modern science it’s not enough to be curious; one also needs to be competitive.
Isaacson does his best to translate complicated biology into simple terms; “The Code Breaker” has enough science to sate actual scientists and will give lay readers like myself flashbacks of struggling through Biology 101. He also presents us with the more pressing issue — the moral implication of gene editing — highlighting the famous 2018 event when scientist He Jiankui went rogue and created “CRISPR babies,” sparking a crisis in the field.
After hundreds of pages spent with professors, Isaacson gives us some fresh air in the form of the Scotchswigging selfexperimenting biohacker Josiah Zayner, who breathes life into the narrative and forces the book to reckon with the fact that biotechnology, like computer technology, could soon become mainstream, with regular people tinkering with genes in their garages.
If biotechnology becomes more democratized, will we be able to outsmart the next pandemic without relying solely on labcoat scientists? Or will basement tinkerers open a biological Pandora’s box? “The Code Breaker” highlights the thrill and terror of standing at the precipice of this new age of biotechnology.