Million Dollar Literature: The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, Walter Isaacson, c. 2021 -- February 15, 2026

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, Walter Isaacson, c. 2021.

A Nobel Prize winner.

Introduction: Into the Breach.

Jennifer Doudna: superstar at Berkeley

co-inventor of CRISPR -- gene editing technology
her world changed: robot competition canceled for her son, Covid -- March 12, 2020
the next day, she led a Berkeley team to decide what role they would play in the Covid outbreak

their first meeting: sat 6 feet apart

it would be their first and last meeting

from now on: Zoom and Slack

CRISPR: human technology to do what bacteria have been doing for millennia to defeat viruses. Amazing. Page xvi.

CRISPR:

the gene-editing tool that Doudna and others developed in 2012 is based on a virus-fighting trick used by bacteria, which have been battling viruses for more than a billion years.
in their DNA, bacteria develop clustered repeated sequences, known as CRISPRs, that can remember and then destroy viruses that attack them.
in other words, it's an immune system that can adapt itself to fight each new wave of viruses -- just what we humans need in an era that has bee plagues, as if we were still in the Middle Ages, by repeated viral epidemics.

Steps Doudna took:

created a coronavirus testing lab;
postdoc Jennifer Hamilton, was one of the leaders of that team/lab
created a team to develop new types of coronavirus tests based on CRISPR
based on lessons learned by starting a company some years earlier that used CRISPR for detecting viral disease
settled on ten projects

Cross-country competitor: Feng Zhang

her rival since 2012
China-born and Iowa-raised researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

CRISPR:

already science fiction becoming real

November, 2018: a young Chinese student who had been to some of Doudna's gene-editing conferences used CRISPR to edit embryos and remove a gene that produces a receptor HIV;
that led to the birth of twin girls, the world's first "designer babies."

A digression: is CRISPR being use in embryo research to "prevent/cure/ameliorate" sickle cell disease?

After two billion years, humans can now edit genes. Time for a discussion with ChatGPT.

Doudna:

a graduate student in the 1990s
other biologists were more interested in DNA
Doudna: RNA
wow! What a choice!
Covid-19; seasonal flu viruses: RNA
if I read this correctly, it was already called CRISPR when Doudna was doing her research -- but Doudna was studying "the CRISPR system" that bacteria were using in their battles against viruses;
but now Doudna was using that same CRISPER system to edit genes;
this reminds me of Jensen Huang pivoting with GPUs -- taking chips that were used for gaming to using those same chips for AI -- amazing!

AI prompt: The CRISPR system was already being used by bacteria to fight viruses when Doudna used the CRISPR system to edit genes. So, Doudna did not discover / invent CRISPR. She used the bacterial CRISPR system to edit genes. That was her breakthrough. Is that correct? And, of course, if accurate, that would raise issues with regard to patents. Is that accurate? Your thoughts?

Gemini: