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‘The Code Breaker’ Review: Isaacson Explores the Paradigm-Shifting Science of Gene Editing

Walter S. Isaacson’s ’74 most recent biography follows the life of a scientific discovery almost as much as it does the life of one incredible scientist. “The Code Breaker” details the story of Jennifer Doudna as she embarks on a journey to unravel some of the mysteries of biology. Doudna, who grew up being told that women can’t involve themselves with science, would become one of America’s greatest thinkers and kindest genetic researchers. Following her discovery of the CRISPR-cas9 system of possible gene editing, her life flew into the center of controversy and cutting-edge science. By taking a holistic look at what got Doudna, and one of her friends and co-researchers, onto the virtual stage for the 2020 Nobel Prize ceremony, Isaacson uncovers and demystifies the stigma around high level thinking and biologic research in “The Code Breaker.”

By walking through the life of a character, the beginning of the too-short 500 page biography feels like many of Isaacson’s other incredible stories. Reminiscent of his definitive look into the life of one of the previous centuries most iconic minds, Albert Einstein, the story starts with Doudna’s childhood adventures throughout her home on the big Hawaiian island Hilo. A little girl who never quite fit in, Doudna found solace in good books — particularly James Watson’s “The Double Helix,” detailing his discovery of the structure of DNA.

In an elegant approach, this biography contains not one story, but two connected and parallel storylines evolving beside one another: the life and work of Jennifer Doudna at UC Berkeley, and the emergence and popularization of CRISPR. In many ways, Isaacson’s chapters that focus on CRISPR bring to light the unusual and often untold stories of how these kinds of breakthrough discoveries emerge. In a chapter titled, ‘The Yogurt Makers,’ Isaacson takes the time to not only honor the history of CRISPR’s emergence, but also to shed light on some scientists who often go unnoticed, making it clear that no scientific discovery is made by a single scientist. There is an international web of cooperation and communication, which Isaacson makes clear as he follows and writes about the stories of the researchers from the U.S., China, Sweden, Lithuania, Spain and the rest of the world.

It is these little stories — one or two chapters a piece, giving credit where credit is due and shedding light on the foggy procedure of institutional research — where Isaacson's expertise as a biographer shines through. As a former Harvard student, Isaacson knows of the ivory tower and prestige that clouds opportunity at illustrious universities. By writing about the humanity of great scientists and innovators like deans at Harvard Medical School, researchers at the Broad Institute, and collaborators from the Max Planck Society, Isaacson gives readers the opportunity to see into a world that can otherwise seem inaccessible to many.

With a great quote from James Watson, Isaacson brings forth the big question that arises from the emergence of easy and possible gene editing: “If scientists don’t play God, who will?” Isaacson explores the moral and ethical questions that accompany making germline edits for the first time in global history. There is potential for permanent encoding of inequality as edits go beyond correcting genetic diseases and into more nebulous realms. Isaacson discusses the importance of Doudna’s work in the recent descent into a global pandemic as SARS-Cov-2 emerged in late 2019. The scientific world was tasked with rapidly studying this mysterious new disease and Doudna’s lab emerged at the forefront, using CRISPR as a way to not only diagnose and test for Covid-19, but also to actively fight it with the cas enzymes.

Jennifer Doudna led her lab to be one that is based on collaboration and cooperation across disciplines, and this was how she prepared herself to face Covid-19. To celebrate her contributions in combating Covid-19 and her ground breaking gene edition research, Doudna — along with her 2012 partner Emmanuelle Charpentier — won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Walter Isaacson, with his decades of celebrated experience, documented Doudna’s life and work beautifully. By taking the time to walk through her lab, get hands-on experience, and interview hundreds of scientists that have contributed to the field of gene editing, Isaacson and his work as a biographer stands apart.

— Staff Writer Mikel Davies can be reached at [email protected] .

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Book Reviews

Walter isaacson's 'code breaker' spotlights the woman at the forefront of crispr.

Jackie Northam

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster hide caption

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

In early November 2018, twin girls — Lulu and Nana — were delivered by caesarian section in a Chinese hospital. Their birth probabably would have gone unnoticed outside of the family except for one factor: They were the world's first gene-edited babies.

A Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, edited their embryos ostensibly in an effort to protect them from being infected with the HIV virus, using a gene editing tool called CRISPR. The announcement of designer babies was met with horror and outrage, particularly in the scientific community. He lost his job and was sentenced to three years in prison.

These potential, and far-reaching, consequences of gene-editing technology are themes running through Walter Isaacson's new book The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race.

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Crispr scientist's biography explores ethics of rewriting the code of life.

Coming in at nearly 500 pages, the book dives into the essence of life and the heady world of genomes and genetic coding, or what Isaacson calls "the third great revolution of modern times," following the atom, and the bit which led to the digital revolution.

For the uninitiated — those folks who cannot tell their DNAs from RNAs — understanding this new frontier in science can be a bit daunting. Take this example early on in the book when Isaacson explains the difference between the two:

"RNA (ribonucleic acid) is a molecule in living cells that is similar to DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), but it has one more oxygen atom in its sugar-phosphate back bone and a difference in one of its four bases."

Isaacson makes it clear that RNA has played a starring role both in The Code Breaker, as well as in the life and career of its central character, Jennifer Doudna, who was the co-recipient — with Emmanuelle Charpentier — of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of CRISPR, the gene-editing technology.

CRISPR is the unwieldy acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which is essentially a natural way of altering or replacing DNA sequences in a cell. It is being tested in food and animals and, in a limited way, to correct or treat genetic defects such as sickle-cell anemia.

Like his earlier books on Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, and Albert Einstein, Isaacson leans heavily on profiles to tell the broader story. In this case, he focuses on Doudna (pronounced DOWD-nuh) to explore the confluence of science, innovation, and ethics.

Doudna was raised in Hawaii where with blonde hair and blue eyes she says she felt like "a complete freak." But she loved exploring nature in the surrounding meadows and sugarcane fields, and was encouraged by her father and a biology professor to think about a life devoted to science.

That interest was ignited when her father gave her a battered paperback copy of James Watson's The Double Helix, a lively account about the discovery of the structure of DNA for which he won a Nobel prize in 1962, along with fellow biochemists Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.

Isaacson passionately charts Doudna's swiftly rising star, as she moves from labs and schools, including Harvard and Yale, ultimately ending up at the University of California, Berkeley where she heads the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology.

But Isaacson also pays tribute to the many others who, in their own way, contributed to the understanding and development of gene editing, by weaving in compelling vignettes along with glossy photos of scientists and researchers. It's a broad cast of characters, and at times the choice seems a bit random. But, ultimately, it helps create an understanding that these breakthroughs are not created in a bubble, it requires a patchwork of experiments and expertise over many years.

The mini-biographies also highlight the interpersonal relationships and rivalries among the scientists. It was eye-opening to read of the ferocious competition, backstabbing and underhanded efforts that can go on as scientists and researchers attempt to get papers published first, win prizes, or obtain patents that can bring in billions of dollars to a college. More than once Isaacson questions whether science suffers in the race for glory.

Isaacson doesn't hold back about Doudna's own strong competitive streak, or her ongoing competition with Feng Zhang, a China-born researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT. Over the years the two have been locked in legal battles over patents.

But there is also collaboration amongst scientists when the need arises, as was the case in 2018. The birth of the gene-edited babies in China was a clarion call for the scientific community at large. It was seen as crossing a red line. Gene editing to battle sickle cell anemia was one thing, using the technology in the hopes of making babies taller, smarter, free of any disease was another.

Since then, Doudna has become the face of the ethical dialogue surrounding the potential of CRISPR technology — speaking widely, including to Congress, about the promise and the serious, even dangerous, implications if this powerful technology.

Isaacson wraps up on a positive note, adding a final chapter on the role of CRISPR technology in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, helping to detect the RNA of the coronavirus.

In the epilogue, Isaacson admits to what becomes abundantly clear throughout the book — that he too read The Double Helix when he was young and, like Doudna, wanted to become a biochemist. He didn't. Instead he chose a profession that gives him a prime seat to view this new scientific horizon.

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By Dava Sobel

• March 8, 2021

THE CODE BREAKER Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race By Walter Isaacson

The coronavirus pandemic forced Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier to accept the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry virtually, instead of actually attending the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ annual December ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall, where the king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, would have given each of them an 18-karat gold medal along with a congratulatory handshake. This year’s gala, like so many events everywhere, was canceled for the first time in decades.

The landmark research that brought Doudna and Charpentier to the pinnacle of global acclaim has the potential to control future pandemics — either by outwitting the next viral plague through better screening and treatment or by engineering human beings with better disease resistance programmed into their cells. The technique of gene editing that they patented, which goes by the unwieldy acronym of CRISPR-Cas9, makes it possible to selectively snip and alter bits of DNA as though they were so many hems to take up or waistbands to let out. The method is based on defenses pioneered by bacteria in their ages-old battle against viruses.

Doudna and Charpentier — one American, the other French — are the sixth and seventh women to win the chemistry Nobel in its century-plus history. (Marie Curie was first, in 1911, followed by her daughter Irène in 1935.) The names Doudna and Charpentier had already been notably paired in 2015, when they jointly won the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, and again in 2018, when they collected the coveted Kavli Prize in Norway. Although they have never belonged to the same research institution, they formed a successful collaboration with each other and numerous colleagues in several countries by building on shared interests, camaraderie and competition.

The CRISPR history holds obvious appeal for Walter Isaacson, a biographer of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci. In “The Code Breaker” he reprises several of his previous themes — science, genius, experiment, code, thinking different — and devotes a full length book to a female subject for the first time. Jennifer Doudna, a genuine heroine for our time, may be the code breaker of the book’s title, but she is only part of Isaacson’s story. The subtitle promises a wider reach: “Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race.” This may sound like publisher’s hyperbole, but Isaacson devotes much anguished discussion to the ethics of gene editing, especially when it comes to “germline” changes that can be passed on through generations and “enhancements” such as green eyes or high I.Q. that prospective parents could insert into their offspring’s genomes.

The term “code breaker” also describes the CRISPR complex itself, which cuts through the double strands of the DNA molecule carrying the genetic code.

“The Code Breaker” introduces Doudna on a sleepless night early last March, just before “lockdown” became a household word. She and her husband, the Berkeley geneticist Jamie Cate, are driving to Fresno to retrieve their teenage son, Andy, from a robotics competition set to begin later that day. A few hours’ reflection has left Doudna time to question the wisdom of leaving Andy with more than a thousand other kids in an enclosed convention center, given the specter of the incipient epidemic. Andy, understandably, is none too happy to see his parents again so soon, but, as the reunited family decamps, he receives a text message announcing the competition’s cancellation. All of Andy’s fellow robot enthusiasts from high schools statewide must likewise leave the premises immediately.

This is a good place to start the story, because “The Code Breaker” is in some respects a journal of our 2020 plague year. By the final chapter, Isaacson has enrolled in a vaccine trial. Between the main character’s frantic road trip and the author’s rolled-up sleeve, there is room to explore Doudna’s childhood, trace her career, meet her competitors and collaborators, fret over the future fallout of the CRISPR revolution and marvel at its positive potential.

Fortunately for Doudna, her early reading of “The Double Helix,” by James Watson, proved formative. She breezed right past Watson’s snarky comments about the structural biologist Rosalind Franklin’s looks and took away an important message: Rosalind Franklin was a scientist; therefore Jennifer Doudna could be one, too. Echoes of those encouraging words emanate from the pages of “The Code Breaker,” as well as from Doudna’s own book, “A Crack in Creation,” written with her former student Samuel Sternberg and published in 2017. Its subtitle, “Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution,” reflects a sober respect for what her years of effort have wrought.

“The Code Breaker” is a handsome volume with color photos distributed generously throughout. While the pictures enhance the storytelling, the narrative flow is constantly interrupted by subheads and space breaks. Almost every spread includes one, as though admonishing the reader to pay attention.

Isaacson keeps a firm, experienced hand on the scientific explanations, which he mastered through extensive readings and interviews, all of which are footnoted. In a chapter called “I Learn to Edit,” he tries his hand at editing human DNA using CRISPR, expertly guided by Doudna’s associates.

Most of Isaacson’s first-person appearances in “The Code Breaker,” which are numerous, demonstrate his diligence as a reporter. He attends scientific conferences, tours labs, consults experts on both sides of disputes, even facilitates an important phone call between two principal personalities. However, a certain clubbiness attends some of these references, as when he names the restaurants where key conversations occur, even including, in one case, the menu highlights:

“When the first day of presentations is over, Doudna and Sternberg go to a casual restaurant in Old Quebec City, but I accept an invitation from Feng Zhang to join him and a small group of his friends for dinner. Not only do I want to hear his perspective, but I also want to check out the inventive new restaurant he has chosen, Chez Boulay, which features crispy seal meatloaf, huge raw scallops, Arctic char, seared bison and cabbage blood sausage.”

Some of the most exciting sections of “The Code Breaker” detail the way CRISPR researchers rose to the Covid challenge: They developed rapid test procedures and vaccine strategies — and posted them to an open database for the benefit of the entire scientific community, spurring progress to a gallop.

Considerable challenges attend the writing of a book about a developing field of science. For all the care invested, not to mention the perfect timing of the Nobel Prize, the epilogue of “The Code Breaker” contrasts sadly with our current reality. Isaacson, enjoying a fine day last fall on his balcony in New Orleans’s French Quarter, “can again hear music on the street and smell shrimp being boiled at the corner restaurant.” There was no way for him to know the enemy virus would surge and mutate by his book’s publication date to become even more contagious than before, though he suspected it might.

Reflecting on the nature of scientific research, Isaacson lets Emmanuelle Charpentier have the next-to-last words: “At the end of the day,” she tells him, “the discoveries are what endure. We are just passing on this planet for a short time. We do our job, and then we leave and others pick up the work.”

Dava Sobel is the author of “Longitude,” “Galileo’s Daughter” and, most recently, “The Glass Universe.”

THE CODE BREAKER Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race By Walter Isaacson Illustrated. 516 pp. Simon & Schuster. $35.

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The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson review – a science page-turner

Designer babies and ethical quicksand ... The biographer of Steve Jobs tells the story of Jennifer Doudna and the development of gene-editing

O ne of the most striking passages in Walter Isaacson’s new book comes towards the end. It is 2019 and a scientific meeting is under way at the famous Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in New York State, but James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, is banned from it because of the racist and scientifically unfounded views he has expressed on intelligence. Isaacson, who is to interview Watson, therefore has to make his way to the house on the nearby campus that the scientist has been allowed to keep. When the conversation sails dangerously close to the race issue, someone shouts from the kitchen: “If you are going to let him say these things, then I am going to have to ask you to leave.” The 91-year-old Watson shrugs and changes tack.

The voice from the kitchen belonged to Rufus, Watson’s middle-aged son who suffers from schizophrenia. “My dad’s statements might make him out to be a bigot and discriminatory,” he once said. “They just represent his rather narrow interpretation of genetic destiny.” In many ways, Isaacson observes, Rufus is wiser than his father.

Genetic destiny is a central theme of The Code Breaker , Isaacson’s portrait of the gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna , who, with a small army of other scientists, handed humanity the first really effective tools to shape it. Rufus Watson’s reflections encapsulate the ambivalence that many people feel about this. If we had the power to rid future generations of diseases such as schizophrenia, would we? The immoral choice would be not to, surely? What if we could enhance healthy human beings, by editing out imperfections? The nagging worry – which might one day seem laughably luddite, even cruel – is that we would lose something along with those diseases and imperfections, in terms of wisdom, compassion and, in some way that is harder to define, humanity.

Doudna contributed to the identification of Crispr, a system that evolved in bacteria over billions of years to fend off invading viruses. Crispr-Cas9, to give it its proper name, disarms viruses by slicing up their DNA. Bacteria invented it, but the insight that won Doudna – a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley – the Nobel prize in chemistry last year, along with French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier , was that it could be adapted to edit genes in other organisms, including humans. The paper that sealed the duo’s fame was published in 2012, when Charpentier was working at Umeå University in Sweden. By the beginning of 2020, two dozen human trials were under way for medical applications of the technique – for conditions from cancers to atherosclerosis to a congenital form of blindness.

The Crispr story is made for the movies. It features a nail-biting race, more than its fair share of renegades, the highest prize in chemistry, a gigantic battle over patents, designer babies and acres of ethical quicksand. It presents a challenge to a biographer, however, who has to pick one character from a cast of many to carry that story. Isaacson chose Doudna, and you can understand why. Having helped to elucidate the basic science of Crispr, she remains implicated in its clinical applications and in the ethical debate it stimulated – unlike Charpentier, who has said that she doesn’t want to be defined by Crispr and is now pursuing other science questions. Doudna is the thread that holds the story together.

Still, you can’t help wondering how that story might have read if it had been told from the point of view of Francisco Mojica, the Spanish scientist who first spotted Crispr in bacteria inhabiting salt ponds in the 1990s. He intuited that it did something important, then doggedly pursued this line of research despite a lack of funding and the fact that everyone told him he was wasting his time. A different story again might have been told via the two French food scientists who realised in 2007 that Crispr could be harnessed to vaccinate bacteria against viruses, thus securing the future of the global yoghurt industry, or the Lithuanian biochemist Virginijus Šikšnys, who moved the story on again, but whose work was rejected by top journals.

Each one made an essential contribution, and it’s difficult to say whose, if any, was the most important. A similar dilemma preoccupied Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffmann in their 2001 play Oxygen , which asked who should receive a “Retro-Nobel” for the discovery of the eponymous gas. Should it go to the scientist who discovered oxygen but didn’t publish his discovery, the one who published but failed to understand the discovery’s significance, or the one who grasped its significance but only thanks to the insights of the other two?

Focusing on Doudna also paints the Crispr story as more American than it was. Doudna herself acknowledged its international dimension, in her own account, A Crack in Creation (2017). “All told, we would be quite the international group,” she wrote of the team that produced the seminal 2012 paper, “a French professor in Sweden, a Polish student in Austria, a German student, a Czech postdoc, and an American professor in Berkeley”. The fact that her Czech postdoc and Charpentier’s Polish student had grown up close to each other – either side of a border – and that both spoke Polish, reinforced the group’s synergy and sped the writing of the paper.

It was precisely because so many people contributed, and because they disagree about the significance and primacy of their contributions, that they remain entangled in a row over ownership. The Crispr revolution owes a great deal to America and the premium it places on creativity and innovation, but as with so many scientific breakthroughs, there was an element of convergence – of people independently and more-or-less simultaneously arriving at the same insight. (Isaacson suggests radar and the atomic bomb were American inventions too, but radar was developed in many countries in the run-up to the second world war, while European refugees from that war helped build the bomb.)

It’s not only the discovery process that is collective. As soon as a discovery is made public an even wider circle of people will apply it, and they may not have the same priorities. It’s easy and right to condemn Chinese maverick He Jiankui for editing the genes of twins Lulu and Nana, supposedly to protect them from HIV infection, but in his impassioned reply to Doudna’s criticism of his act there seems buried a grain of truth. “You don’t understand China,” he told her. “There’s an incredible stigma about being HIV positive, and I wanted to give these people a chance at a normal life ...” Genetic destiny means different things to different people, as Rufus Watson understands.

Isaacson, who is best known for his lives of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci, remains a consummate portraitist. He captures the frontier spirit of Harvard geneticist George Church in an anecdote about how, when Church was a child, his physician stepfather let him administer hormone injections to his female patients (Church has been testing experimental Covid-19 vaccines on himself lately). Isaacson also has a privileged vantage point, knowing the Crispr backstory and the personalities that shaped it. In 2000, as editor of Time , he put the two men leading competing efforts to sequence the human genome – Francis Collins and Craig Venter – on the cover. He understands the tensions that drive discovery and how flawed brilliant people can be. This story was always guaranteed to be a page-turner in his hands. It’s just that science has outgrown biography as a medium. His subject should have been Crispr, not Doudna.

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Codebreaker

The highs and lows of Alan Turing's life, tracking his extraordinary accomplishments, his government persecution through to his tragic death in 1954. In the last 18 months of his short life,... Read all The highs and lows of Alan Turing's life, tracking his extraordinary accomplishments, his government persecution through to his tragic death in 1954. In the last 18 months of his short life, Turing visited a psychiatrist, Dr. Franz Greenbaum, who tried to help him. Each therapy s... Read all The highs and lows of Alan Turing's life, tracking his extraordinary accomplishments, his government persecution through to his tragic death in 1954. In the last 18 months of his short life, Turing visited a psychiatrist, Dr. Franz Greenbaum, who tried to help him. Each therapy session in this drama documentary is based on real events. The conversations between Turing... Read all

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Alan Turing : I think if you find a person like that; And I don't think everybody does find one; In fact I think it's terribly rare; Then all you thought before; All your plans for yourself; You realize they were just filling a gap; They were just something for you to do while you were waiting for this person. And everything you want to be is something for him not yourself. There is a drawback, however; Finding such a person makes everybody else appear so ordinary. And if anything happens to him, you've got nothing left but to return to the ordinary world; And a kind of isolation that never existed before.

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CodeBreakers Reviews

No All Critics reviews for CodeBreakers.

StarTribune

Review: 'the code breaker,' by walter isaacson.

"The Code Breaker" marks the confluence of perfect writer, perfect subject and perfect timing. The result is almost certainly the most important book of the year.

Author Walter Isaacson is one of the nation's premier biographers. In studies of Steven Jobs, Albert Einstein and others, he's demonstrated an uncanny ability to do exhaustive research, organize it all and present it lucidly, separating wheat from chaff.

He puts all those talents to good use in discussing the monumental achievements of Jennifer Doudna, a salmon who swam upstream against the flow of male chauvinism and spawned … Well, she spawned the future.

Doudna grew up in Hawaii and became interested in science after reading James Watson's "The Double Helix." She was particularly interested in the role played by Rosalind Franklin, whose data Watson used without her permission.

"What mainly struck me," Doudna told Isaacson, "was that a woman could be a great scientist."

It was possible, but not easy. Her high school guidance counselor told her: "Don't you know women don't do science?"

But she persevered, earning a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Harvard Medical School in 1989. After several stops, including an assistant professorship at Yale, she was offered her own lab at UC-Berkeley, entered into a long-distance partnership with French biochemist Emmanuelle Charpentier and, along with her, invented a technology called CRISPR-Cas9 that could be programmed to edit targeted DNA molecules.

The discovery opened up the world of biotechnology, raising the possibility that many diseases could be cured and that life could be extended.

It is Isaacson's genius that he explains this complicated process — and how Doudna reached it starting from ground zero — in clear, concise, layperson's terms.

But he doesn't stop there. Isaacson also discusses a host of unresolved moral and ethical issues that Doudna's scientific work has raised. He quotes a young man who has sickle cell anemia but who says he doesn't wants a cure, telling documentary filmmakers he has gained a great deal having it, "I learned patience with everyone. I learned how just to be positive."

Notes Isaacson, "challenges and so-called disabilities often built character." He wonders whether FDR would have been FDR without polio. Or whether Miles Davis would have been Miles Davis with sickle cell.

There is not only the issue of how to decide whether a procedure should be done, but the question of who makes that decision. National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins told the author: "Evolution has been working toward optimizing the human genome for 3.85 billion years. Do we really think that some small group of human genome tinkerers could do better without all sorts of consequences?"

Even if we resolve what tinkering is permitted, how do we resolve who gets it? CRISPR treatments are expensive. One for sickle cell costs $1 million. Do only the wealthy get the benefits?

Are we in an era where people can order designer babies? Part of what makes the book so timely is that now is when these issues need to be discussed.

In 2020, Doudna and Charpentier were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Promotion-wise for a writer, that's like hitting the Powerball.

Curt Schleier is a book critic in New Jersey.

The Code Breaker

By: Walter Isaacson Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 560 pages. $35.

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Movie Reviews

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World War II may have been won by our side because of what British code-breakers accomplished at a countryside retreat named Bletchley Park.

There they broke, and broke again, the German code named "Enigma," which was thought to be unbreakable, and was used by the Nazis to direct their submarine convoys in the North Atlantic. Enigma was decoded with the help of a machine, and the British had captured one, but the machine alone was not enough. My notes, scribbled in the dark, indicate the machine had 4,000 million trillion different positions--a whole lot, anyway--and the mathematicians and cryptologists at Bletchley used educated guesses and primitive early computers to try to penetrate a message to the point where it could be tested on Enigma.

For those who get their history from the movies, "Enigma" will be puzzling, since " U-571 " (2000) indicates Americans captured an Enigma machine from a German submarine in 1944. That sub is on display here at the Museum of Science and Industry, but no Enigma machine was involved. An Enigma machine was obtained, not by Americans but by the British ship HMS Bulldog, when it captured U-110 on May 9, 1941.

Purists about historical accuracy in films will nevertheless notice that "Enigma" is not blameless; it makes no mention of Alan Turing, the genius of British code-breaking and a key theoretician of computers, who was as responsible as anyone for breaking the Enigma code. Turing was a homosexual, eventually hounded into suicide by British laws, and is replaced here by a fictional and resolutely heterosexual hero named Tom Jericho ( Dougray Scott ). And just as well, since the hounds of full disclosure who dogged " A Beautiful Mind " would no doubt be asking why "Enigma" contained no details about Turing's sex life. The movie, directed by the superb Michael Apted , is based on a literate, absorbing thriller by Robert Harris , who portrays Bletchley as a hothouse of intrigue in which Britain's most brilliant mathematicians worked against the clock to break German codes and warn North Atlantic convoys. As the film opens, the Germans have changed their code again, making it even more fiendishly difficult to break (from my notes: "150 million million million ways of doing it," but alas I did not note what "it" was). Tom Jericho, sent home from Bletchley after a nervous breakdown, has been summoned back to the enclave because even if he is a wreck, maybe his brilliance can be of help.

Why did Jericho have a breakdown? Not because of a mathematical stalemate, but because he was overthrown by Claire Romilly ( Saffron Burrows ), the beautiful Bletchley colleague he loved, who disappeared mysteriously without saying goodbye. Back on the job, he grows chummy with Claire's former roommate Hester Wallace ( Kate Winslet ), who may have clues about Claire even though she doesn't realize it. Then, in a subtle, oblique way, Tom and Hester begin to get more than chummy. All the time Wigram ( Jeremy Northam ), an intelligence operative, is keeping an eye on Tom and Hester, because he thinks they may know more than they admit about Claire--and because Claire may have been passing secrets to the Germans.

Whether any of these speculations are fruitful, I will allow you to discover. What I like about the movie is its combination of suspense and intelligence. If it does not quite explain exactly how decryption works (how could it?), it at least gives us a good idea of how decrypters work, and we understand how crucial Bletchley was--so crucial its existence was kept a secret for 30 years. When the fact that the British had broken Enigma finally became known, histories of the war had to be rewritten; a recent biography of Churchill suggests, for example, that when he strode boldly on the rooftop of the Admiralty in London, it was because secret Enigma messages assured him there would be no air raids that night.

The British have a way of not wanting to seem to care very much. It seasons their thrillers. American heroes are stalwart, forthright and focused; Brits like understatement and sly digs. The tension between Tom Jericho and Wigram is all the more interesting because both characters seem to be acting in their own little play some of the time, and are as interested in the verbal fencing as in the underlying disagreement. It is a battle of style. You can see similar fencing personalities in the world of Graham Greene , and of course it is the key to James Bond.

Kate Winslet is very good here, plucky, wearing sensible shoes, with the wrong haircut--and then, seen in the right light, as a little proletarian sex bomb. She moves between dowdy and sexy so easily, it must mystify even her. Claire, when she is seen, is portrayed by Saffron Burrows as the kind of woman any sensible man knows cannot be kept in his net--which is why she attracts a masochistic romantic like Tom Jericho, who sets himself up for his own betrayal. If it is true (and it is) that " Pearl Harbor " is the story of how the Japanese staged a sneak attack on an American love triangle, at least "Enigma" is not about how the Nazis devised their code to undermine a British love triangle. That is true not least because the British place puzzle-solving at least on a par with sex, and like to conduct their affairs while on (not as a substitute for) duty.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Enigma (2002)

Rated R For A Sex Scene and Language

117 minutes

Dougray Scott as Tom Jericho

Kate Winslet as Hester Wallace

Jeremy Northam as Wigram

Saffron Burrows as Claire Romilly

Tom Hollander as Waldau Logie

Corin Redgrave as Admiral Trowbridge

Matthew MacFadyen as Cave

Directed by

• Michael Apted
• Tom Stoppard

Based On The Novel by

• Robert Harris

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