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Walter Isaacson has written another timely and captivating book about both a key figure, Jennifer Doudna, and an emerging technology that will change humanity. Already well-known for best selling tomes on Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, and Albert Einstein, Isaacson turns his attentions to biotechnology. He personalizes the story by focusing on Jennifer Doudna, who along with her collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But, his book really is a story of the biotechnology revolution, with many smaller and larger biographies thrown in for good measure, including ones on Charpentier, James Watson, Francis Crick, Feng Zhang, George Church, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Rosalind Franklin, and many others. As luck would have it, he is able to pull in headlines from the news, including the global response to Covid-19, to infuse his stories with greater meaning and urgency.
Isaacson attempts to stoke drama from the otherwise dry and intellectual pursuits of researchers; he animates them with Shakespearean emotions like pride, envy, guilt, hubris, ignorance, fear, and so on. He even manages to make them seem vain and petty at times. Yet, as much as he tries, the characters in his book are not larger than life like Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci; they are far more normal with more or less ordinary lives, though of course exceptional…