This is a thrilling account of the very recent history of CRISPR Cas9 gene editing technology.Of equal interest and import. The book sheds light on how sexism racism and xenophobia play out in contemporary science.For those readers (like me) who are still fuzzy on CRISPR...CRISPR (pronounced crisper) is an acronym for: clustered (C) regularly (R) interspaced (I) short (S) palindromic (P) repeats (R).CRISPR is a type of DNA sequence, found in bacteria that have previously been infected by a virus...

Isaacson is a biographer’s biographer and THE CODE BREAKER shows why his books totally absorb us. He has a way of revealing absorbing truth about his subjects — in this case, biochemist and gene scientist Jennifer Doudna, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for the revolutionary DNA-editing tool called CRISPR. Jennifer’s father gave her a copy of The Double Helix when she was six, sparking her keen interest in gene research. Later its author, James Watson, said her CRISPR development was “the most im...

“I began this journey thinking that biotechnology was the next great scientific revolution, a subject that was filled with awe-inspiring natural wonders, research rivalries, thrilling discoveries, lifesaving triumphs, and creative pioneers such as Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, and Feng Zhang. The Year of the Plague made me realize I was understating the case.” --Walter Isaacson, in the epilogue of The Code Breaker The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing,

The CRISPR gene editing system is one of the coolest and perhaps most consequential scientific breakthroughs of the last decade. I’m familiar with it because of my work at the foundation—we’re funding a number of projects that use the technology—but I still learned a lot from this comprehensive and accessible book about its discovery by Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues. Isaacson does a good job highlighting the most important ethical questions around gene editing...

3.5 starsUntil 2020, only five women, beginning with Marie Curie in 1911, had won a Nobel for chemistry. But 2020 was the year it went to two women, Jennifer Doudna and French colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier, for the development of CRISPR, a gene editing technology. Isaacson hones in on Doudna and Charpentier, but he also highlights others in the scientific community whose work led the way and contributed to this new discovery. Some of the more interesting chapters deals with biohackers, rivalr...

I've taken it from five stars to four after mulling the book and having written the review, I realize I only want to give it three. This is a good book but too wide in scope. It's not a biography of Jennifer Doudna, although there is a focus on her. For those who think the covid-19 was discovered with amazing rapidity, that's not true. Doudna and Charpentier (actually Charpentier made the key discovery but this book has some bias in favor of American scientists) discovered their particular CRISP...

When O started reading this book I was a bout weary about it. Even though I believe in science whole heartedly I'm not very knowledgeable about the in and outs of it. But ai was intrigued that this what about a woman and her research sounded interesting so I decided to give it a go. I'm so glad I did. It was an very informative book with a lot of interesting facts and such. Wasn't aware it was going to mention a lot of other people as well. The other biographies by Walter Isaacson had focuses on...

I have loved all the three books that I was fortunate enough to read by Walter Issacson from Einstein, The Innovators, to Steve Job, this author was able to enthrall me with the main topics he chose to share and write of. However, sad to say, his new book on Jennifer Doudna entitled The Code Breaker really left me feeling disappointed and let down. Wondering why this was, I will preface this that there was a huge amount of science, very technical science which did bog down the story. Now, I do

CRISPR(Jennifer Doudna et al. 🤩) + Walter Isaacson => AWESOMENESS!!It was good! Very good indeed. Title is a bit misleading. It is not a full biography of Jennifer Doudna alone. Rather, it’s a biography of CRISPR technology and a detailed story of how it was discovered from fascinating and complicated collaborations between numerous great scientists. The story of CRISPR is not done yet. The research is still ongoing and very much alive. This technology is promising us A Brave New World of geneti...

Isaacson may be brilliant at writing biographies (I've never read any of them), but this book is neither a comprehensive biography of Jennifer Doudna (or any of the other scientists involved), nor is it a decent science book that explains the science of the CRISPR (a gene editing tool) mechanism in any detail. This is rather an all over the place, long-winded, and choppy mish-mash of vague biography with history and a bit of science, starting with the discovery of DNA by James Watson and proceed...

I wanted to read more about the scientific basis and ethical implications of genetic modification. I was also interested in the role of CRISPR in the development of vaccines. This book accomplished that, but it told me more about the lives of the scientists and their rivalries than I wanted to know. Most of them have turned their discoveries into business ventures and I had no interest in their race to publish first or their patent lawsuits. The last 20 -25% of the book was the most interesting

The Code Breaker is a gripping account of how the pioneering scientist Jennifer Doudna, along with her colleagues and rivals, launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and enhance our children. In the spring of 2012, the Berkeley biochemist Jennifer Doudna and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the future of the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of me...

Walter Isaacson is a true storyteller, and this book yet another compelling, fast to read, educational, biography. He goes deep into the fascinating and burgeoning world of CRISPR to explain it and its origins. And it's clear that CRISPR is changing the world, and will be something we are all familiar with in the decades to come. The moral dilemmas CRISPR brings are large, and the book appropriately spends a lot of time on them. So far, most scientists and governments have approached it from the...

Walter Isaacson has, in Code Breaker, made an excellent argument for the value of basic scientific research. When biochemists first understood what the "junk DNA" in bacteria were designed to do, it was to all appearances, an interesting but inconsequential discovery. The junk DNA was actually part of the bacteria's immune system; the bacteria used RNA to extract snippets of attacking virus' genetic code in order to remember them next time and attack the dangerous viruses. As time went on, other...

Thoughts soon.

I had been literally dying to read this book since when Walter Isaacson posted about this online. Earlier he had authored da Vinci's biohgraphy in 2017. After finishing that book, I wondered whether I would be lucky enough to read another work from him. Yeah, I have been lucky in that sense ~ It took only four years!Well, what can I say about this book? I am feeling intensely emotioanl about this one and obviously, I would give it A Thousand Stars! Apart from Atul Gawande's "Being Mortal", this

*3.5 stars*I read The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race for a few reasons, one to have some talking points when people say nonsense about vaccines, and another because I always like to have a "respectable" book to talk to patients about so I don't have to reveal that I enjoy alien/human romances... I think The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race was very informative, even if the storytelling felt a bit all ove

Walter Isaacson’s The Code Breaker is full of some really smart people. Now while nobody in their right mind would ever describe me as smart (usually the descriptions tend to veer towards: well-meaning, doing the best he can with what he has, unusually sticky, and strangely flavorful. But never smart.), and while many of the scientific details in The Code Breaker were a struggle for me to comprehend (at the conclusion of this book my poor pecan-sized brain felt like it had just completed 16 non-...

DNF at 22%.Mr. Isaacson and I just don't see eye to eye. Here we find Isaacson tut-tutting over James Watson's sexist treatment of Rosalind Franklin, a crystallographer whose data and interpretation of same were critical to establishing the structure of DNA:Franklin was a focused scientist, sensibly dressed. As a result she ran afoul of English academia's fondness for eccentrics and its tendency to look at women through a sexual lens, attitudes apparent in Watson's descriptions of her. "Though h...

"One fundamental aspect of science will remain the same. It has always been a collaboration across generations, from Darwin and Mendel to Watson and Crick and Franklin to Doudna and Charpentier."I simply have no words to express how much I loved this amazing and historically recorded book. Walter Isaacson! Sir, you have such a diverse taste in science, arts and literature. The books narrates in a story-like manner, the journey from DNA to RNA and from RNA to CRISPR. Science has never ceased to a...