Recent Reads | The Code Breaker

Ross’ Recommendation

Back in May, it would have been easy to believe I was reading science fiction when I saw the Wall Street Journal report about a newborn whose life was saved by a bespoke gene-editing therapy. It wasn’t science fiction; it was applied science of the CRISPR technology that corrected a genetic mutation that left the baby unable to produce enzymes necessary to properly digest proteins.

CRISPR technology and its history are detailed in Walter Isaacson’s The Code Breaker, a 2022 biography of Jennifer Doudna and her pioneering, Nobel Prize winning work in genetic editing. CRISPR is the easy to say acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats that occur in prokaryotic genomes. The leap of the CRISPR technology was the idea of splicing DNA into organisms as a remedy to treat/correct/cure disease arising from genetic mutations. Sickle cell disease (Sickle Cell Anemia) was an early candidate for the technique. The infant in the article above was suffering from severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 (CPS1) deficiency, a genetic mutation, and the designed therapy is a demonstration of CRISPR’s far-reaching potential.

Science is sometimes awe inspiring to an extreme that art, music, or sports can’t approach. In the current era, art, music, and sports are easily monetized in a way that thrusts them in our face in a fashion that we mostly enjoy. For the most part, science is not easily or obviously commercialized.

More than four decades ago, as an aspiring teenage scientist, I worked in labs that pursued NIH-funded cancer research, lignin degradation studies funded by the Department of Energy, and mung bean breeding funded by the US Department of Agriculture. Every time a grant ran out, the labs worried that funding would not be renewed to enable the perpetuation of the work. Reason prevailed, and science continued.

Reading The Code Breaker won’t make you a gene-splicing expert. It might, however, give you an inkling of the life-changing potential that life sciences present today. With that inkling, you might be better positioned to support continued funding of basic scientific research at America’s great universities.

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