The Big Question: Is the Promise of Gene Editing Worth the Risks?
A Q&A with Walter Isaacson, author of “The Code Breaker,” on how gene editing technology could help cure diseases like Covid-19 — and create new nightmares in the process.
Doudna’s discoveries may change life as we know it.
ISAAC LAWRENCE/AFP via Getty Images
This is one of a series of interviews by Bloomberg Opinion columnists on how to solve today’s most pressing policy challenges. It has been condensed and edited.
Timothy Lavin: Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic, or CRISPR, may prove to be one of the most significant discoveries of the century. By allowing scientists to “edit” the human genome, CRISPR is already helping to treat certain heritable diseases and may one day cure them entirely. But it might also allow parents to select genetic traits for their children, from hair color to intelligence, or prove to be a powerful weapon in the wrong hands.
You’ve written several biographies of great innovators, from Leonardo da Vinci to Steve Jobs. Your latest book, “The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race” tells the story of the scientists and researchers rushing to understand this system — most notably Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist and Nobel Prize winner, who was among the first to recognize that CRISPR could be used as a tool to easily edit an organism’s DNA. What drew you to writing about this subject?
Walter Isaacson, author, “The Code Breaker”: I’ve always been interested in innovation revolutions, starting with Albert Einstein and the physics revolution, and then the digital revolution, which I examined through “Steve Jobs” and “The Innovators.” And I realized that the driver of innovation for the first half of this century was going to be the life-sciences revolution.
So I started hanging out with the people who were involved in genetic editing and other biotech fields. And the more I got to know Jennifer Doudna, the more I realized she would be a great central character because she touched on every aspect of the revolution. She figures out the structures of RNA, and RNA turns out to be this miracle molecule that not only serves as a guide for gene-editing tools, such as CRISPR, but also as a messenger that allows us to make vaccines against things like the coronavirus. And it struck me that all these things can be recoded now, and that molecules have become the new microchip.
TL: You write that “figuring out if and when to edit our genes will be one of the most consequential questions of the 21st century.” Do you think that the full significance of this tool has started to dawn on policy makers?