The Code Breaker

A Best Book of 2021 by Bloomberg Businessweek, The Washington Post, and Time

A gripping narrative of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, defeat viruses, and have healthier babies.

Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues made the most important advance in biology since the discovery of the structure of DNA: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opens up a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions, and has already been used to treat deadly diseases, fight the 2020 pandemic, and make heritable changes to the genes of babies.

Should we use our newly acquired abilities to hack evolution to make ourselves less susceptible to viruses? What a wonderful gift that would be! And what about preventing depression? Hmm... Should we allow parents to enhance their children's height, muscles, or IQ if they can afford it?

After helping discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in the efforts to answer these moral questions, winning the Nobel Prize in 2020 alongside her colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier. Her story unfolds the deepest wonders of nature: from the origin of life to the future of our species.