The Code Breaker

This book, by Walter Isaacson, was very long to listen to (16 hours) but totally worth it. Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize for the discovery, in 2020, with her collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, for discovering the gene-editing process called CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) and Isaacson tells that story.

The book talks about it all: biology, viruses, the research, the fights, the collaborations, the controversies, the ethical questions, the rivalries, the international experts, the incredible moments, the conferences, the genetically-modified Chinese babies, the discussions, the money, the moral issues, the discovery of DNA, the publications, biohacking, and also COVID-19, which was also studied by Doudna’s lab (and many others), since the book was published in 2021.

One thing I thought while listening to this book was that this discovery was as significant for human beings as the « discovery » of generative AI: it is something that is changing EVERYTHING in our world, and something that can be used to do great things but also horrifyingly scary and dangerous things. The only (small and maybe even non-existent) difference is that we (as non-scientific experts) don’t follow what’s happening in labs and tech companies, so we don’t really realize what’s happening, what’s changing, what’s being invented every day, what’s possible today that was not possible yesterday.

Of course, even before reading this book, I was always uncomfortable with the possibility of genetically modifying humans to make them taller, smarter, faster, stronger, blah blah. As with everything, the rich will get there faster, of course, and stupid people will do stupid things. This book didn’t change my opinion on all this at all. The only thing I realized was that if I could be genetically modified so that my Alzheimer’s genes would be completely cut out and replaced by healthy genes, I’d do it in a heartbeat! But that’s a clear and easy « fix » to argue for. It is a lot more complicated to argue for or against many other potential changes, and things get slippery and ugly very quickly.

Overall it’s an awesome book. It’s fascinating, well explained, extremely well researched, and packed with more detail than you ever wanted, especially when it discusses publication controversies and who discovered what first: enlightening, but OMG sometimes tedious, too! You also hear about the crazy race to publishing stuff first and to getting the Nobel Prize, totally insane!

PS. The first narrator of the book is pretty terrible but he only reads the introduction. The main narrator is excellent.