This Book is available for you to borrow from our Lobby Book & Bumper Sticker Library. Look for it next time you’re in the shop, and our Service Advisors will tell you how to check it out. If you want to pick up a copy for yourself, our hyperlinks go to Powell’s Bookstore. If you want to shop even more locally, Sellwood’s own Julie Wallace would love to see you at Wallace Books.
We heard about this months Spotlight book in an interview on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’. Doudna’s story is fascinating, but Issacson’s deep dive on some of the potentials of genetic engineering for us, and specifically for our descendants for the rest of human history, are hypnotizing. Ready to be made radiation-proof? We’ve linked to that interview as well as the book itself.
“The Code Breaker”
Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
by Walter Issacson
(from the publisher) 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 co-discovery of the structure of DNA. She and her collaborators turneda 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.
Here’s Terry Gross’ 47-minute Fresh Air interview with Walter Issacson
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 a thrilling detective tale that involves the most profound wonders of nature, from the origins of life to the future of our species.
