The Code Breaker
Walter Isaacson
11 people recommended it in 2 threads, 2021.
What people on Hacker News said
The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson, a biography of Jennifer Doudna, the woman who founded CRISPR and won the Nobel prize. Great read, thrilling.
The Nobel Prizes are awarded for conferring the greatest benefit to humankind. Showing how to use CRISPR as a genome editing tool (Doudna and Charpentier) confers much more benefit to humankind than "just" characterizing CRISPR (Mojica).
The book is great at emphasizing and re-emphasizing the incremental nature of the journey, all the competition and co-discovery and the tiny steps building on each other's work that led up to Doudna and Charpentier's breakthroughs.
Isaacson has a knack for writing flowing non-fiction prose that make for a great read.
Where it comes up
- Books I loved reading this year 2021 · 10 recommendations
- Ask HN: What's the best book you read in 2021? 2021 · 1 recommendation