Those familiar with college-level biology will have a better time, but nobody will regret the reading experience.Ī vital book about the next big thing in science-and yet another top-notch biography from Isaacson.Ī former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.ĭiscovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. Using charts, analogies, and repeated warnings for readers to pay attention, the author describes a massively complicated operation in which humans can program heredity. Some scientific concepts (nuclear fission, evolution) are easy to grasp but not CRISPR. A diligent historian and researcher, Isaacson lucidly explains CRISPR and refuses to pass it off as a far-fetched magic show. At this point, Isaacson steps back, keeping Doudna as the central character but describing the rush to apply gene editing to altering life and curing diseases, the intense debate over its morality, and the often shameful quarrels over credit and patents. Formally accepted by the editors of Science in 2012, the co-authored paper galvanized the scientific establishment and led to a torrent of awards, culminating in the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Although known since the 1970s, “genetic engineering” was a complex, tedious process. With collaborators, she discovered how CRISPR operates and invented a much simpler technique for cutting DNA and editing genes. Others had discovered that this was a defense mechanism-CRISPR DNA generates enzymes that chop up the DNA of the infecting virus. In 2006, she learned about CRISPR, a system of identical repeated DNA sequences in bacteria copied from certain viruses.

After fellowships and postdoc programs at the University of Colorado and Yale, she joined the faculty at the University of California in 2002. Raised by academic parents who encouraged her fascination with science, she flourished in college and went on to earn a doctorate in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology from Harvard.

A magisterial biography of the co-discoverer of what has been called the greatest advance in biology since the discovery of DNA.įor the first third of Isaacson’s latest winner, the author focuses on the life and career of Jennifer Doudna (b.

Isaacson the code breaker