In parts Five, Six, and Seven, Isaacson outlines the moral pros and cons that have been bantered around since the 1960s and the self-policing effort developed by a conference of scientists in 1975.
Of course, no book about this field would be complete with a discussion of the ethics involved. He also explores the emerging field of biohackers: “the renegade spirited band of renegade researchers and merry hobbyists who want to democratize biology through citizen science and bring its power to the people.” In Parts Two, Three, and Four, he goes on a long tack with a detailed history of gene editing and the use of CRISPR in therapies fighting sickle cell, cancer, congenital blindness and Alzheimer’s by many American and international scientists, including those in Doudna’s Berkeley laboratory. (This effort won the University of California at Berkeley scientist the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier.) He starts “The Code Breaker” like a traditional biography, focusing on Doudna’s early life in Hawaii, but quickly deviates to James Watson and Francis Crick’s effort to define the structure of DNA. Then back to Doudna’s early career moves (he inserts chapters on the Human Genome project and the shift of research focus from DNA to RNA) that eventually put her on the forefront of the emerging bioscience field of gene editing with “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” known to all as CRISPR. Much like a sailboat tacking into a fierce wind, Walter Isaacson’s “biography” of gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna bounces all over the genetic spectrum. "The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race"
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