Review: The Code Breaker

The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hooter: A biography of CRISPR and the field of gene editing along with the players involved.

This is a part biography, part biochemistry deep dive, part philosophy on scientific thinking and ethics and part rest of it all. Whilst it starts off with Jennifer Doudna, the book evolves into all the major players involved around CRISPR, the competitive races in the scientific publishing community, discussion around passion and goals, the eccentricities of the very smart , a lot of heavy biochemistry deep dive and how it all ties into current affairs with the race to first identify corona virus and then the work towards the vaccine. I liked how "history" is in a timeline I have lived through around the 90s and 2000s. Walter does justice to bring in a gender perspective to field of Science giving Rosalind Franklin her time in the sun along with focusing on Jennifer and her former co worker and fellow Nobel Prize winner Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier having to fight sexism to get their due. Science may be objective, the pursuit of it and the accolades are very subjective as highlighted in this and many other books on science and it's history.

Whilst you do get a sense of the world of sciences, compared to other books , this gets too in depth with the science and maybe repetitive to an extent for a non doctorate like me unless Walter was trying to structure his book similar to CRISPR and the repeating structures. The world of gene editing, bio hackers, importance of scientific rigour, ethical dilemma, possibilities of the future if we can edit our own genes and the recent battles against covid provide a mix of a lot and clearly an attempt at something different. Though I do wonder if Walter wasn't treating this subject, would the book have been even worse and it is his sheer talent that I could stay hooked even to the extent that I did.

In summary, I guess the book could have been CRISPR.

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