The Code Breakers

About This Book

For the whole of human history, the code that specifies a living thing was something we inherited and passed on but could not touch. Then, in a single lifetime, that changed. We learned to read the three-billion-letter book of the human genome — and, astonishingly recently, to write in it.

E.B Cohen tells the sweeping, human-scale story of genetic engineering, from ten thousand years of blind breeding through Mendel’s peas and the double helix, the recombinant-DNA revolution and the Asilomar pause, the triumphs and one terrible death of early gene therapy, the fights over GMOs and Golden Rice — and then to the heart of the tale: how a defense system that yogurt bacteria use against viruses became, in the hands of Doudna, Charpentier, Zhang, and others, a tool that could edit any gene in any organism, including us.

It is a story of curiosity that looked useless for decades, of a bitter fight over credit and billions of dollars, of the night a scientist in China edited human embryos and crossed the line the whole field had sworn never to cross — and of the December morning when regulators approved the first CRISPR cure and a woman with sickle-cell disease was, in effect, healed.

Rigorous, vivid, and even-handed about promise and peril, this is the story of how our species learned to rewrite life — and the question that power forces upon us: now that we can, who decides what we should?