“The Code Breaker” (Simon & Schuster), the latest book by Walter Isaacson, an excellent biographer from Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin to Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, tells the story of biochemist Jennifer Doudna and the creation of the editing technology called CRISPR.
Read the excerpt below, and don’t miss communicator David Pogue’s interview with Isaacson and Doudna on “CBS Sunday Morning” March 7th!
Simon & Schuster
Introduction
To the break
Jennifer Doudna could not sleep. Berkeley, the university where she was a top leader for her role in designing the gene editing technology called CRISPR, had just closed its site due to the coronavirus infection. Against her better judgment, she had moved her son, Andy, a high school senior, to the train station so he could go to Fresno for a robot building competition. Now, at 2 in the morning, she got up with her husband and demanded that they get him back before the start of the game, when more than twelve hundred children would gather in a center. internal conference. They pulled on the clothes, arrived in the car, found an open gas station, and made the trip three hours. Andrew, the only child, was not happy to see them, but persuaded him to pack up and come home. As they pulled out of the parking lot, Andrew received a text from the team: “Robotics game has been canceled! All kids must leave immediately!”
This was the time, Doudna recalls, that she realized that her world, and the world of science, had changed. The government was scrapping its response to COVID, so it was time for professors and graduate students, grabbing their test tubes and lifting their pipes high, to run their -into the break. The next day – Friday, March 13, 2020 – she led a meeting of her Berkeley colleagues and other scientists in the Bay Area to discuss the roles they could play.
A dozen of them made their way over the derelict Berkeley site and came together on the narrow stone and glass building that housed her laboratory. The chairs in the conference room on the floor were grouped together, so the first thing they did was move them six feet apart. They then turned on a video system so that another fifty researchers from nearby universities could join Zoom. As she stood in front of the room to the gathering, Doudna showed an intensity that she usually hid with a calm face. “This is not something academics usually do,” she told them. “We need to step up.”
It was fitting that a virus fighting team led by a CRISPR pioneer. The gene editing tool developed by Doudna and others in 2012 is based on a virus-fighting trick used by bacteria, which has been fighting viruses for over a billion years. In their DNA, bacteria re-develop clustered sequences, called CRISPRs, that are able to recall and then destroy invading viruses. In other words, it is a defense system that can change itself to fight every new wave of viruses – just what we need in a plastered time, as it were. we are still in the Middle Ages, with viral infections.
Always prepared and organized, Doudna (pronounced DOWD-nuh) gave slides that suggested ways in which they could take over the coronavirus. She was guided by listening. Although she had become a famous scientist, people felt comfortable communicating with her. She had mastered the art of being tightly recorded while still finding the time to connect with people emotionally.
The first team assembled by Doudna was tasked with creating a coronavirus lab. One of the directors she was tapping was a postdoc named Jennifer Hamilton who, a few months earlier, had spent a day teaching me to use CRISPR to edit human genes. I was glad, but also a little motionless, to see how easy it was. Even I could do it!
Another team was tasked with developing new types of CRISPR-based coronavirus tests. It helped that Doudna enjoyed commercial ventures. Three years earlier, she and two of her graduate students had started a company to use CRISPR as a tool for detecting viral infections.
In launching an effort to uncover new tests to detect the coronavirus, Doudna was opening another face in its strong but fruitful struggle with a cross-country competitor. Feng Zhang, a magical young researcher born in China and raised in Iowa at the MIT Broad Institute and Harvard, had been her rival in the 2012 race to turn CRISPR into a gene editing machine, and ever since then they had been locked into strong competition for scientific discoveries and the creation of CRISPR-based companies. Now, when the pandemic began, they would engage in another race, this one was motivated not by pursuing patents but by a good will.
Doudna focused on ten projects. She suggested leaders for each and asked others to sort themselves into the teams. They should be paired with someone who would do the same duties, so that there would be a battle trigger system: if the virus hit any of them, there would be someone to step in and continue with it. their work. This was the last time they met in person. From then on the teams collaborated with Zoom and Slack.
“I wish everyone would start soon,” she said. “Really soon.”
“Don’t worry,” one of the participants told her. “Nobody has travel plans.”
None of the participants expected a longer range: using CRISPR to innovate hereditary preparations in humans would make our children, and all our offspring, more vulnerable to viral infections. These genetic improvements could permanently alter the human race. “That’s in the world of science fiction,” Doudna said immediately as I raised the issue after the meeting. Yes, I agreed, it ‘s a bit like that A brave New World no Gattaca. But like any good science fiction, elements have already come to fruition. In November 2018, a young Chinese scientist who had been to some Doudna gene editing conferences used CRISPR to edit embryos and extract a gene that provides a receptor for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. This led to a couple of girls, the first “design baby.”
There was an immediate surprise and then a panic. Weapons lit, committees convened. After more than three billion years of life evolution on this planet, one species (us) had developed the talent and the temperature to take control of its own genetic future. There was a sense that we had crossed the threshold into a whole new age, perhaps a new heroic world, as when Adam and Eve entered the apple or Prometheus plucked fire from the gods.
Our new ability to make edits to our genes raises interesting questions. Should we edit our species so that we are less susceptible to deadly viruses? What a great thing! South? Should we use gene editing to eliminate anxiety disorders, such as Huntington’s, sickle-cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis? That feels good, too. And what about deaf or blind? Or be short? Or depressed? Hmmm … How should we think about that? A few decades from now, if possible and safe, should we allow parents to strengthen their children’s IQ and muscles? Should we let them decide the color of the eye? Skin color? Height?
Whoa! Let’s pause for a moment before slipping all the way down this slippery slope. What might that have to do with the diversity of our society? If we are no longer under a random natural lot when it comes to our virtues, will it weaken our feelings of empathy and acceptance? If those sacrifices at the free genetic supermarket are not (and will not be) there, will that greatly increase inequality – and indeed codify it permanently in the human race? Given these issues, should such decisions be left to individuals alone, or should society at large have a voice? Maybe we should improve some rules.
By “we” I mean us. All of us, you and I among them. Finding out if and when we edit our genes is one of the biggest questions of the 21st century, so I thought it would be helpful to understand how it is. to do. Likewise, recurrent waves of virus epidemics make it important to understand the life sciences. There is joy that comes from seeing how something works, especially when that thing is ourselves. Doudna relieved that joy, so we can. That’s what this book is about.
CRISPR innovation and the COVID plague will accelerate our transition to the third major version of modernity. These uprisings arose from the discovery of the three basic kernels of our lives, beginning a little over a hundred years ago: the atom, the fragment, and the gene.
In the first half of the twentieth century, beginning with Albert Einstein’s 1905 papers on relevance and quantum theory, revolution was driven by physics. In the five decades after his miraculous year, his theories introduced atomic bombs and nuclear power, transistors and spacecraft, lasers and radar.
The second half of the twentieth century was an age of information technology, based on the idea that all information could be coded by binary numbers – called beats – and all logical processes could be made by switches with off-switch switches. In the 1950s, this led to the development of the microchip, the computer and the internet. When these three devices were combined, the digital version was born.
Now we have entered the third century and even more importantly, the turn of life science. Children who study digital coding will join those who study genetic coding.
Drawn from “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race” by Walter Isaacson. Copyright © 2021 by Walter Isaacson. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
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