A little girl who never quite fit in, Doudna found solace in good books - particularly James Watson’s “The Double Helix,” detailing his discovery of the structure of DNA. Reminiscent of his definitive look into the life of one of the previous centuries most iconic minds, Albert Einstein, the story starts with Doudna’s childhood adventures throughout her home on the big Hawaiian island Hilo. By taking a holistic look at what got Doudna, and one of her friends and co-researchers, onto the virtual stage for the 2020 Nobel Prize ceremony, Isaacson uncovers and demystifies the stigma around high level thinking and biologic research in “The Code Breaker.”īy walking through the life of a character, the beginning of the too-short 500 page biography feels like many of Isaacson’s other incredible stories.

Following her discovery of the CRISPR-cas9 system of possible gene editing, her life flew into the center of controversy and cutting-edge science. Doudna, who grew up being told that women can’t involve themselves with science, would become one of America’s greatest thinkers and kindest genetic researchers. “The Code Breaker” details the story of Jennifer Doudna as she embarks on a journey to unravel some of the mysteries of biology. Isaacson’s ’74 most recent biography follows the life of a scientific discovery almost as much as it does the life of one incredible scientist. When bench scientists become lab heads their new managerial duties include hiring the right young researchers, mentoring them, going over their results, suggesting new experiments, and offering up the insights that come from having been there.Walter S. Writers become editors, engineers become managers.

This transition from player to coach happens in many fields. I can see experiments in my mind, especially when I am working myself.” But by 2009, after her return from Genentech, Doudna realized that she had to spend more time cultivating her lab rather than her bacterial cultures. “I think I was a pretty good experimenter. “I didn’t want to give that up,” she says. For the first few years after setting up her lab at Berkeley, she was able to work at the bench half her time. “Doudna deeply enjoyed being a bench scientist, a researcher who gets to the lab early, puts on latex gloves and a white coat, and begins working with pipettes and Petri dishes.

The code breaker by walter isaacson