Scientific evaluation

The Code Breaker captures the competitiveness and politics of modern science, and the progress of science in the field of evolution and genetics.

Walter Isaacson loves researching and writing about the lives of geniuses. The former Time editor is a biographer par excellence and has profiled subjects ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci to Albert Einstein, and from Steve Jobs to Henry Kissinger.

His latest volume is ostensibly the biography of US scientist Jennifer Doudna, one of the two women who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020. (Frenchwoman Emmanuelle Charpentier was the other recipient and the duo won for their work on CRISPR, the gene editing tool). I use the term “ostensibly” because The Code Breakers is far more than the story of