Isaacson, the author of several bestselling books, including biographies of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, and Albert Einstein, is the rare raconteur who can enliven complex science and the people and history involved in its making. The apparently enormous market of readers who require novelistic details in their nonfiction-such as the kind of sandwich over which history-making discussions about recombinant DNA happened (pastrami)-will be thrilled. The reader will feel like a fly on the wall at eureka moments, in lab races, dueling presentations, and patent battles. Isaacson deftly dramatizes science-in-action vignettes, with surprisingly few pages devoted to Doudna’s journey from being told by a school counselor that “girls don’t do science” to scientific stardom. When it comes to DNA, our code breaking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: if the Allies had had the same level of expertise in actual cryptology that scientists now have with DNA, they might well have lost World War II. Doudna and her colleagues’ innovation was to configure and use this viral “mugshot” system to target and insert specific genetic sequences, creating a flexible DNA cut-and-paste tool. Enzymes associated with CRISPR sequences cut up attacking viral DNA and insert a section of it into the bacteria’s own genome in order to recognize it in the future. These repeating DNA features were found to be part of the defense system that bacteria have evolved over their billions of years of warfare with viruses. The Code Breaker contains 481 pages of Oscar-level cinematic prose, providing a whistle-stop tour of how Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a large supporting cast discovered and developed the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR-an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. But when it comes to DNA, our code breaking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: if the Allies had had the same level of expertise in actual cryptology that scientists now have with DNA, they might well have lost World War II. To suggest that Doudna is a “code breaker” is to compare her to, say, the British code breakers of World War II who cracked the notorious German Enigma code. And that isn’t the only conceptual gap papered over by this beautifully built behemoth. So, from the very title of Walter Isaacson’s latest biography, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, he’s off to a rocky start. To say that scientists now understand life’s “code” is a stretch.

The code breaker jennifer doudna