The Code Breaker

Jennifer Doudna, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, is the subject of Walter Isaacson's biography. Isaacson traces her path from the sixth-grader who found a copy of The Double Helix left on her bed by her father, and who persisted after a high school counselor told her girls did not become scientists. Doudna and her colleagues turned a curiosity of nature into CRISPR, an easy-to-use tool for editing DNA, and the book follows what happened once it reached the marketplace. It sets out the moral questions gene editing raises, from making people less vulnerable to viruses to letting parents pay to enhance a child's height, muscles or IQ.

Bill Gates included it among five books he loved reading in 2021 and credited Isaacson with drawing out the central ethical questions about gene editing.