The Code Breaker

I haven’t written a book report since 5th grade, but I recently read a great book that hit on almost every topic I enjoy writing about, so here goes. The Code Breaker is a biography about Nobel Prize winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna by Walter Isaacson (bestselling biographer of Steve Jobs, Einstein, Ben Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci). The story begins and continuously circles back to James Watson, part of the world-famous duo of Watson and Crick that discovered the double helix structure of DNA. As a young girl Doudna read Watson’s memoir The Double Helix and was fascinated not just by the biology and biochemistry, but also by the contribution of Rosalind Franklin, a young English biochemist whose X-ray diffraction pictures helped cement Watson and Crick’s understanding of the elusive DNA structure. While Franklin’s contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA is not an untold secret, her place in history in unknown to many and was downplayed at the time. Franklin’s story highlights the patriarchal environment of science and academia and foreshadows Doudna’s success in The Code Breaker. Jennifer’s collaboration with another female scientist, Emmanuelle Charpentier (her future co-winner of the Nobel Prize) provides an encouraging divergence from the historical male domination of the STEM fields. Doudna’s takeaway from The Double Helix was not just about the secrets of life hidden in the strands of DNA, but that “girls do science.”  
 
The Code Breaker is not only the tale of strong female scientist achieving greatness in her field, but it is also an insightful story about genetics, biochemistry, the modern pharmaceutical industry, bioethics, patent law (yes, it hits on that as well), and COVID-19. The other star of the book is the focus of Doudna and Charpentier research: CRISPR (“clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”) a revolutionary gene-editing technology with the ability to forever change the human genome. Each of these topics deserves its own shelf of books and in a perfect world we would immerse ourselves in each subject to understand their ever-increasing effects on our daily lives. However, as they say, life is short, and The Code Breaker is a great primer (pun intended) for all of these topics.                      
 
Isacson’s biography weaves a story around Doudna’s life touching on research, science, IP, commercial development and even the current pandemic. First is the collaborative effort to discover the CRISPR system and its eventual uses in human medicine. Explaining the CRISPR system allows for a walkthrough of both genetics and scientific research. Next the book details the intellectual property battles between Doudna’s UC Berkley team and Feng Zhang’s MIT/Broad Institute team, an excellent introduction to the complexities of patent law for any budding inventor (or patent attorney) and a great tale of scientific rivalries. After the patent wars the book delves into the development of practical applications from theoretical ideas providing insights on the coordination between venture capital, academic research and the biologics industry. Finally, all of these topics are wrapped up in the story of how Doudna’s (and others’) contributions to biotechnology help conquer (hopefully) the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
A critical topic in the book that gets very little discussion outside of academic and medical circles is bioethics. With the fast-changing pace of biotechnology it is not a question of if, but when and how we will change our own DNA and that of our children. Bioethics raises almost infinite questions of ethics and morality with regard to what we should change and who will have access to these technologies. Should we eliminate genetic diseases? Probably some, but we should first have a thorough understanding about what we are doing and what are the long-term effects. Should we allow parents to choose their child’s sex, height, eye color, hair color, muscle mass, skin tone, and intelligence? If yes to even a few of these, who will have access, and if it’s only the rich are we creating a greater and biologically permanent division between the haves and have nots of this world? These are topics that clearly cannot be addressed in a blog post or a single book, but are issues that will need to be discussed and understood by everyone.

The Code Breaker addresses everything from nature versus nurture, the ethics of gene editing (and the ethics of not gene editing), James Watson’s difficult relationship with the scientific community, the tension between scientific cooperation and intellectual property, and the future of medical technology. Even if we cannot have answers to all of these topics its reassuring to at least know the questions are being asked. And on a personal level it’s a great book to hand to my thirteen-year-old daughter with full knowledge that I’ll be drowning in questions as she makes her way to the end.    
 
I hope my book report has addressed the main characters, setting, plot, conflict and resolution in The Code Breaker (I’m hoping for a gold sticker). I’ll submit my report via google classroom and at my blog, “Should I copyright the trademark in my patent?” If you have any questions about patents, trademarks or IP in general please contact me at [email protected] or visit my website at www.chiaraiplaw.com
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