A 2022 Audie Award Finalist
A Best Book of 2021 by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, and The
Washington Post
The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns
with a "compelling" (The Washington Post) account of how Nobel Prize
winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that
will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier
babies.
When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find
that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed.
She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she
loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was
right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by
the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life.
Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn't become
scientists, she decided she would.
Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn
discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book's
author, James Watson, told her was the most important biological advance
since his codiscovery of the structure of DNA. She and her collaborators
turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the
human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it
opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.
The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for
coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation
revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the
microchip, computer, and internet. Now we are entering a life-science
revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those
who study genetic code.
Should we use our new evolution-hacking powers to make us less
susceptible to viruses? What a wonderful boon that would be! And what
about preventing depression? Hmmm...Should we allow parents, if they can
afford it, to enhance the height or muscles or IQ of their kids?
After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling
with these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle
Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020. Her story is an "enthralling
detective story" (Oprah Daily) that involves the most profound wonders
of nature, from the origins of life to the future of our species.
