3d render of DNA spirals.
According to Walter Isaacson, three great technological revolutions have shaped the modern world, based on three fundamental kernels of human existence: the atom, the bit and the gene. After exploring the physics revolution through the eyes of Einstein and the digital revolution through Apple’s supreme leader Steve Jobs, the best-selling biographer felt it was time to switch to DNA. It’s no surprise, then, that he chose Jennifer Doudna, the co-discoverer of CRISPR gene-editing technology, to tell the story of how the human species took control of its own evolutionary destiny.
Isaacson’s latest book, The codebreaker, follows Doudna breathlessly from a childhood spent through the Hawaiian wilderness to her pioneering work with a bacterial defense system to rewrite the code of life – and the bitter patent battle that followed – and ultimately win the ultimate honor, the Nobel Prize. Based on more than five years of frontline reporting of the DNA hacking wars, the book is an immersive deep dive into the fascinating science of gene editing and the personal dramas behind the discoveries. Even if you think you know the story of CRISPR, you don’t know the way Isaacson does.
He spoke to WIRED from his home in New Orleans, where he is now a professor of history at Tulane University. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: The biotechnology revolution didn’t start with CRISPR or Doudna. So why her?
Walter Isaacson: Jennifer Doudna’s journey begins in sixth grade, when her father leaves The double helix, by James Watson, on her bed and she realizes it’s actually a detective story. That’s why she wants to become a scientist. And even after her guidance counselor told her girls don’t do science, she insisted. Then she helped figure out the structure of a type of RNA that helps answer one of the biggest questions of all: How did life on this planet begin? And then her RNA studies took her to CRISPR and the discovery that it could be a gene editing tool, the magnitude of which leads her to gather scientists to explore the moral issues of how such a discovery should be used.
My father gave me The double helix when I was also in high school. And while I’ve always been interested in biochemistry, I’ve always regretted not taking it beyond a few courses in college. It’s nice to understand how something works, especially if it’s us. So while there are all kinds of wonderful characters that could have been the focus of this book, Doudna’s life’s journey just seemed like a compelling narrative thread through this longer history of scientists striving to understand what makes us human.
You don’t shy away from putting on Doudnas conflict with the Broad Institute more than CRISPRr credit as a contemporary parallel to Rosalind Franklin’s own struggle to be recognized for her contributions to discovering the structure of DNA. Was that intentional?
What Doudna has done is unravel the mysteries of life with the same mindset as Rosalind Franklin, namely that the structure of a molecule is the clue you need as a detective to figure out how it’s really going to work. When Doudna and Charpentier won the Nobel Prize, a little vision flashed in my mind of Franklin with a steady but contented smile on her face.
So you start writing about Jennifer Doudna, and before you know it, she’s going to win the Nobel Prize. Coincidence?
Despite what people think about fake electoral systems, I don’t have the ability to hack the Swedish Academy voting process. I thought it was too early for CRISPR. I mean, it had only been eight years since Doudna and Charpentier’s historic newspaper. But on the morning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was to be announced, I still set my alarm for 4am so I could listen to the live feed. And when I heard the announcement, I let out a scream. The funny thing is that Doudna was actually asleep during the phone calls from Stockholm. When I spoke to her a few hours later, she told me that she had only heard about her win afterwards, from a reporter who called to get her comment.
In many ways, that moment represented the culmination of a years-long clash over who deserves the credit for turning CRISPR from a biological curiosity into one of the most powerful technologies ever invented. What was it like to record that?
Everyone I spoke to was very generous. Feng Zhang, the main competitor for patents and awards, is one of the most charming, open and interesting people you will ever meet. I was a little concerned when I met him because I wrote about people who had been his rivals, but he couldn’t have been nicer.
And so I think access has helped me show that science is a truly human endeavor that often requires a lot of competition – for patents, for awards, and for recognition. Competition is a good thing. It spurs us on. That was true of the competition between Intel and Texas Instruments in the development of the microchip. And it was true with CRISPR. But what’s also true is that when COVID hit, all these scientists put aside the race for patents and turned their attention to the fight against the coronavirus and quickly made their discoveries public so that anyone who joined that fight could use .
So my hope for the book is that it shows the mix of competition and collaboration that is at the heart of science. And the fact that while these are real people with egos and ambitions, they – more than most people – rightly realize that they are part of a noble pursuit that has a higher purpose. I hope everyone in the book comes across as a hero in their own way, because they are.
You were in the middle of reporting this book when something seismic happened in the world of CRISPR. In 2018, a Chinese scientist was named He Jiankui disclosed he had not only edited human embryos, but pregnancies started in them, which led to the birth of twin girls. How did that affect the trajectory of the story you were trying to tell?
That really became a crucial turning point in the story. Because all these scientists now had to grapple with the moral implications of what they helped create. But then it changed again when the coronavirus hit. I ended up working on the book for another year to watch the players take on this pandemic. And that actually caused my own thinking about CRISPR to evolve.
How come?
I think I sometimes felt a deep-seated resistance to the idea that we could edit the human genome, especially in ways that would be hereditary. But that changed both for me and for Doudna as we met more and more people who themselves suffer from terrible genetic problems or who have children who suffer from them. And when our species was attacked by a deadly virus, I was more open to the idea that we must use all the talents we have to thrive and be healthy. So now I’m even more open to gene editing for medical purposes, be it sickle cell anemia, or Huntington’s or Tay-Sachs, or even to increase our resistance to viruses and other pathogens and to cancer.
SIMON AND SCHUSTER
I still have concerns. One is that I don’t want gene editing to be something only the wealthy can afford and it leads to coding inequalities in our societies. And second, I want to make sure we don’t diminish the wonderful diversity that exists within the human species.
Do you have ideas for doing that?
I spend the last few chapters of my book grappling with that question. And I hope not to preach, but to allow the reader to go hand in hand with me and Jennifer Doudna and find out for themselves what their hopes and fears are about this so-called brave new world that we are all stepping into together. I once had a mentor who said there are two kinds of people who are from Louisiana: preachers and storytellers. He said, “For God’s sake be a storyteller, because the world has too many preachers.”
So by telling the story of CRISPR in all its scientific triumphs and rivalries and excitement, I hope to turn people into science. But I also want to make them more proficient to grapple with one of the key questions that we as a society will face in the coming decades: if we can program molecules like we program microchips, what do we want to do with this fire the gods snatched away?
This story first appeared on wired.com.