The Code Breaker unfolds as an enthralling detective story, crackling with ambition and feuds, laboratories and conferences, Nobel laureates and self-taught mavericks. She married Jamie Cate, another geneticist, moved her lab to the University of California in Berkeley, and gave birth to a son-all while wrestling with scientific puzzles off the well-traveled highway of the HGP.Īs Doudna realized: nobody puts RNA in the corner. (The HGP was predicted to take twenty years, but wrapped up in a decade.) Doudna, though, chose to study DNA’s sister molecule, RNA, which was thought to be merely a messenger from DNA to cells in the human body, urging them to produce the enzymes and proteins necessary for life. These were heady times for DNA, the information molecule an international consortium known as the Human Genome Project was ramping up, committed to mapping the human genetic code-all those spirals of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs- and initially helmed by Watson himself.

Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to playĪs an undergraduate at Pomona College Doudna immersed herself in biochemistry and then opted for Harvard for her doctorate. Although Doudna was told that girls don’t do science, Isaacson notes, “nevertheless, she persisted.” Watson presents his and his colleague Francis Crick’s accomplishment at the expense of another researcher, Rosalind Franklin, who haunts the backstage of The Code Breaker. In her sixth-grade year, her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix, James Watson’s chronicle of the race to discover the structure of DNA. The daughter of a literature professor, she grew up in Hilo, Hawai’i, where she roamed the Big Island’s volcanic slopes and lush hollows, wondering why hilahila grass would curl when she touched it. Like Curie before her, Doudna has carved her own path.

The Code Breaker is panoramic in scope and yet a page-turner, reminiscent of The Hot Zone and Hidden Valley Road. “There are three great revolutions of our lifetimes: physics, digital, and now the life sciences,” he says, explaining his shift to Doudna as subject. Isaacson, the doyen of American journalism and a Renaissance-style artist in his own right, pivots off acclaimed biographies of Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs to portray the first woman in his gallery of big ideas. Walter Isaacson’s The Code Breaker (Simon & Schuster) showcases another Nobel prize winner, Jennifer Doudna, PhD, whose pioneering work echoes Curie’s: CRISPR technology, an RNA-based form of gene editing, will enrich us for decades to come.

The book code breaker