The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna and the Race to Understand Our Genetic Code by Walter Isaacson (with Sarah Durand; published 2022) is the bestseller nonfiction adapted for young readers. It details the life and work of one of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winners, a woman who managed to learn to edit genes at the molecular level, a process critical for the development of COVID testing and the vaccine.
In some respects, her Nobel Prize was a delayed gratification for the process, CRISPR, that was developed and reported on in 2012. She didn’t get the reward until 2020, when many other discoveries and developments had been made in the process. But, it is only in retrospect that the significance of her discovery of the process is. For, during the pandemic, gene editing became an essential process.
Her story, however, is packed full of scientific explanations, scientific meetings, and comparison of additional processes to the original. It was not clear to me. I could not follow the gene processes and how it actually worked. How could one change DNA at such a microscopic level? I believe this is my own failing, however, and not one of Isaacson’s book. I am simply an old dog who cannot follow this kind of science with my limited biology education. As such, I admit that most of The Code Breaker was outright boring to me. I’m glad I attempted the Young Reader’s Adaptation instead of the original. I cannot imagine reading of these things in even more detail!
