The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and internet. The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.

She and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.ĭriven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book’s author, James Watson, told her was the most important biological advance since his codiscovery of the structure of DNA. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a “compelling” ( The Washington Post ) account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies. 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.A Best Book of 2021 by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, and The Washington Post 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