The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

Walter Isaacson (born May 20, 1952) is an American author, journalist, and historian. He is the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), and Steve Jobs (2011), among other texts. Isaacson has been the editor of Time, the chair and CEO of CNN, and president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, DC. He currently teaches history at Tulane University in New Orleans and is an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York City-based financial services firm.

Straddling the fields of academia, journalism, business, and policy, Isaacson is uniquely positioned to profile public figures from a holistic, clear-eyed lens. Gravitating toward inventors and innovators, Isaacson immerses himself in the lives of his subjects yet retains a dispassionate outlook. The Code Breaker is the first time Isaacson’s subject has been a woman, and he does the characters of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier justice, while doffing a hat to unsung women heroes of genetics like Rosalind Franklin. Though the first half of the book closely follows Doudna’s career, in the second section Isaacson expands to explore the impacts and implications of CRISPR-enabled gene editing.