The Code Breaker (Walter Isaacson)

The Code Breaker (Walter Isaacson)

Here’re a few passages from the book The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson:

• Never do something that a thousand other people are doing.
• Great inventions come from understanding basic science. Nature is beautiful that way.
• Two revolutions coincided in the 1950s. Mathematicians, including Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, showed that all information could be encoded by binary digits, known as bits. This led to a digital revolution powered by circuits with on-off switches that processed information. Simultaneously, Watson and Crick discovered how instructions for building every cell in every form of life were encoded by the four-letter sequences of DNA. Thus was born an information age based on digital coding (0100110111001…) and genetic coding (ACTGGTAGATTACA…). The flow of history is accelerated when two rivers converge.
• After more than three billion years of evolution of life on this planet, one species (us) had developed the talent and temerity to grab control of its own genetic future.
• The invention of CRISPR and the plague of COVID will hasten our transition to the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions arose from the discovery, beginning just over a century ago, of the three fundamental kernels of our existence: the atom, the bit, and the gene.
• The scientist does not study nature because it is useful. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful.
• Ingenuity without wisdom is dangerous.