By the beginning of 2020, two dozen human trials were under way for medical applications of the technique – for conditions from cancers to atherosclerosis to a congenital form of blindness. The paper that sealed the duo’s fame was published in 2012, when Charpentier was working at Umeå University in Sweden. Bacteria invented it, but the insight that won Doudna – a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley – the Nobel prize in chemistry last year, along with French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier, was that it could be adapted to edit genes in other organisms, including humans. Crispr-Cas9, to give it its proper name, disarms viruses by slicing up their DNA. Photograph: Peter Steffen/APĭoudna contributed to the identification of Crispr, a system that evolved in bacteria over billions of years to fend off invading viruses. “They just represent his rather narrow interpretation of genetic destiny.” In many ways, Isaacson observes, Rufus is wiser than his father.Įmmanuelle Charpentier, who shared the Nobel prize in chemistry with Doudna. “My dad’s statements might make him out to be a bigot and discriminatory,” he once said. The voice from the kitchen belonged to Rufus, Watson’s middle-aged son who suffers from schizophrenia. When the conversation sails dangerously close to the race issue, someone shouts from the kitchen: “If you are going to let him say these things, then I am going to have to ask you to leave.” The 91-year-old Watson shrugs and changes tack. Isaacson, who is to interview Watson, therefore has to make his way to the house on the nearby campus that the scientist has been allowed to keep. It is 2019 and a scientific meeting is under way at the famous Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in New York State, but James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, is banned from it because of the racist and scientifically unfounded views he has expressed on intelligence. O ne of the most striking passages in Walter Isaacson’s new book comes towards the end.

The code breaker walter