The Code Breaker -- Young Readers Edition: Jennifer Doudna and the Race to Understand Our Genetic Code

Jennifer Doudna was born in Hawaii in 1964 (a year before I was!) and was always interested in science. One of her favorite books was Watson's 1968 The Double Helix, which told about his and Crick's discovery of DNA, and she was especially interested in Rosalind Franklin's unheralded contributions to this major scientific finding, and well as the treatment she received. Luckily, her parents supported her in this, even though her school guidance couselor told her that science fields weren't for girls. She didn't listen, and majored in chemisty at Pomona College. She struggled and considered changing her major to French, but decided to stick with it and eventually ended up going to graduate school at Harvard. She then embarked on work with cells that eventually put her in the forefront of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology, the science that can edit DNA so that the body can heal itself from genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia and the like.

Along the way, there were personal and professional challenges, and Isaacson has tirelessly interviewed and researched these occurences for the book. We see personal items like Doudna's marriage, which lead to her and her husband leaving the East Coast so they could work at universities closer to each other; historical information about science in the 1990s through to the present day; and lots of details about how CRISPR works and how it ws used in experiments to help people. Some of these, like the attempts to cure Victoria Gray's sickle cell disease, worked well, although not all trials were successful for all conditions.

Doudna worked with a wide range of scientists, and also investigated different avenues she might pursue, like scientific companies. We get to read about companies like Genetech, and their contributions to the field. Eventually, she worked with Emmanuelle Charpentier, with whom she won the Nobel Prize in 2020. The final chapter of the book discovers the impact that CRISPR technology had on the process of dealing with COVD-19 and the work on vaccinations for this disease.