Book Review
The Code Breaker, Walter Isaacson—book review by Frances Boyd
Do you remember what you were doing on March 13, 2020? It was a Friday!! I had a friend visiting from Atlanta, and we were trying to decide if it was safe enough for us to go to the Gaillard Auditorium to see Ranky Tanky. News was spreading fast about Covid-19 cases, particularly in the northwest. We hadn’t heard of any cases in Charleston so we decided to go to the concert. We ate out in a restaurant, too. It would be well over a year before we did anything like that again.
Know what Jennifer Doudna was doing on March 13? She was calling and texting all of her research colleagues to come together to use their expertise to deal with a virus that scientist and doctors knew, then, would become a global pandemic if not stopped. Meeting by Zoom, Doudna and her team theorized first about creating a test for Covid-19. At the same time, others were working on a vaccine. Using years of research as a backdrop and the incredible tool called CRISPR, researchers put differences aside, temporarily forgot about legal patent fights, and collaborated on what was surely a scientific milestone. While their work did not prevent the pandemic due to many challenges, it saved millions of lives—maybe yours and mine.
If you want to find out exactly what happened and how it happened, I encourage you to read Walter Isaacson’s The Code Breaker. This book is essentially the story of Jennifer Doudna, who, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The book is also so much more. Isaacson’s research took him to many places to meet a myriad of well-known biochemists, and of course he spent untold hours with Doudna. If you can muddle through scientific information that you realize you don’t fully understand, you will be rewarded by understanding more than you thought you would. You will come to appreciate why a Covid-19 test similar to a home pregnancy test was not readily constructed. You will learn why CRISPR, the gene-editing tool Doudna is credited with developing, has revolutionized the world of medicine and challenged the ethical boundaries of science.