In fact, she was a little like her great-granddaughter Jennifer Doudna.ĭoudna was also one of three sisters, although there were no brothers. “She was crusty and stubborn and had a pioneering spirit,” said Doudna’s sister Sarah, who now has the diary. Its pages were filled with tales of determination, hard work, and long hours in the family store, and other frontier pursuits. One daughter became a teacher in Montana and kept a diary that has been handed down over the generations. The parents could not afford for all six children to go to school, so they decided to send the three girls. One of the more popular tales involved one of Doudna’s great-grandmothers, who was part of a family of three brothers and three sisters. Her family often told Doudna and her sisters stories about their ancestors. Feeling so different made her become skeptical of others and careful about the situations she chose to get herself into, even though later in life she became very friendly and open to new experiences. Her classmates called her a haole, a negative term for people who weren’t Native Hawaiians.

But in Hilo, an old town in a volcano-filled region on Hawaii’s “Big Island,” the fact that she was blond, blue-eyed, and lanky made her feel like a complete freak. If she had grown up in any other part of America, Jennifer Doudna might have felt like a regular kid. For now, however, Jennifer and her team are being deployed against our most immediate threat-the coronavirus-and you have just been given a front row seat to that race. Today gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR are already being used to eliminate simple genetic defects that cause disorders such as Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia.

Doudna became an expert in determining the shapes and structures of these RNA molecules-an expertise that led her to develop a revolutionary new technique that could edit human genes. This book guided Jennifer Doudna to focus her studies not on DNA, but on what seemed to take a backseat in biochemistry: figuring out the structure of RNA, a closely related molecule that enables the genetic instructions coded in DNA to express themselves. It was The Double Helix, James Watson’s account of how he and Francis Crick had discovered the structure of DNA, the spiral-staircase molecule that carries the genetic instruction code for all forms of life. When Jennifer Doudna was a sixth grader in Hilo, Hawaii, she came home from school one afternoon and found a book on her bed. Walter Isaacson’s #1 New York Times bestselling history of our third scientific revolution: CRISPR, gene editing, and the quest to understand the code of life itself, is now adapted for young readers!

The code breaker paperback