Famed Biographer Walter Isaacson on Gene Editing, Science, and Good Books

Goodreads: In the book, you compare gene editing with other big inflection points in human history—like the Industrial Revolution or the internet. Now that you're at the end of this rather thorough investigation, what are your feelings about the ultimate significance of this technology? How big of a deal is this for our species?

Walter Isaacson: When I got my first iPhone, and then spent time talking to Steve Jobs about it, I thought, "Wow, this will transform everything. It will bring the internet into our pocket, it will be a communications device as well as a platform on which people can build apps we haven't even thought of, such as Uber and Airbnb."

But now that I see what the biotech revolution is doing, I realize gene editing will be much bigger. Instead of cutting and pasting pictures and documents, we'll be able to do some cutting and pasting of our own genetic makeup, and that of our children and that of our species. We’ll have devices in the home that will test all of our cancers and viruses and bacteria. That's a different order of magnitude from what was wrought by the digital revolution.

GR: The very concept of genetic editing is a scary thought for a lot of people. Are you optimistic about the ethical considerations of all this, in how this technology will be used in the future?

WI: When I first heard about how easy it might be, a few decades from now, to edit our children and our own genes, I recoiled. You know, it was Prometheus snatching fire from the gods. There is this idea that we just aren’t meant to play with nature this way. But the more I understood the technology, the more I had second and third and fourth thoughts.

There are no easy answers. I try to take the reader along with the scientists and the patients and the ethicists. I hope the reader and the characters in the book together get to go on a journey of discovery about using these technologies. It's a discussion that people need to start having—all of us, not just the scientists. 

Every now and then, I’ll be doing an event with Jennifer, and we’ll have people come up quietly afterwards. They’ll show a picture of their 12-year-old daughter and say, "She's got this genetic disease—can you help her?" Or it’s a grandson who is fighting cystic fibrosis. And so you end up asking the question, "Would it be moral to use these technologies?" But you’re also asking the question, "Would it be moral not to use these technologies?" And I think we have to wrestle with both questions.

GR: This is such an ambitious topic, and, like so many of your books, it’s a big one at around 500 pages. How long did it take to research and write?

WI: I worked on it for about six or seven years, early on just gathering details about the life sciences revolution. Then for about four years, I threw myself into it, hanging out at Jennifer Doudna’s lab in Berkeley, or at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, or in Berlin, where Emmanuelle Charpentier’s lab is. In the final year of reporting the book, things changed. I was invited to sit in on all the Zoom meetings and look in on the Slack channels, so I could watch the discoveries being made in real time. 

GR: Can you ballpark how many interviews were involved? 
WI: I think I interviewed about 70 people, and that includes people in labs where I was hanging out, where they were teaching me how to do various things like edit human genes.

GR: Incredible. So when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in the final year of all this, did that change the trajectory of the book?

WI: No, not really. It flowed very naturally because they were using these biotech tools to fight viruses, as well as other things, even before the pandemic hit. I got to hang out virtually as these teams did their work. It was a natural part of the narrative, as was the Nobel Prize that gets awarded right in the middle of the pandemic year. The goal of the book is to make people appreciate what research scientists do. I was able to open the book with them riding to the rescue of the world, carrying their pipettes high as they figure out ways to fight this coronavirus pandemic. I hope it becomes an inspiring journey of adventure.

GR: The book is surprisingly engaging on the storytelling level. It reads like a mystery at times—people chasing down clues and making connections. Did you use particular strategies to keep the readers engaged?

WI: I tried to let it fully unfold as a narrative in real time, step by step, so you can see the race to discover how to do edits in human cells. You can sense the competition as they proceed. And just like The Double Helix by James Watson or The Eighth Day of Creation by Horace Freeland Judson, it’s a narrative tale involving colorful people. It’s more like storytelling than it is a science textbook.

GR: It feels like you’ve got some fiction writer’s tools in your toolbox.

WI: Well, my agent forbids me to try to write a novel. But I do think real-life adventures can be more thrilling than most novels.

GR: There’s a passage early in the book where you write about the critical importance, in science, of making connections between different specialty areas. Can you talk a little about that?

WI: All of the people I've written about—Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Einstein, Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna—they have a curiosity about all aspects of nature and of human endeavor. And that ability to see the patterns in nature, and how they ripple across various fields, is key to their creativity.

Leonardo da Vinci was the ultimate example. He may be the one person in history who best tried to know everything possible about every subject that was knowable, from art to anatomy to math to medicine to zoology. And, of course, you see that in Jennifer Doudna as well, who's a great humanist as well as a wonderful biologist.

GR: To switch gears a little, we’re all about book culture here at Goodreads and are always curious about those books that loom large for readers. Do you remember any book or books that you feel changed the direction of your life and work?

WI: Well, like Jennifer Doudna, my dad gave me The Double Helix by James Watson when I was in middle school, and it made me fascinated with science.

Another book I read, when I was about 12, was The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. He’s a novelist from down here in New Orleans and was a friend of the family. I never quite knew what he did for a living because he was always sitting around on this bayou north of Lake Pontchartrain. I asked his daughter, "What does your dad do?" And she said, "He's a writer." It was the first time I realized that you could be a writer, just like you could be an engineer, or fisherman, or a doctor.

I read his first book, and it seemed to have a lot of philosophical and moral messages in it. One day, I asked him about it. He said that two types of people come out of Louisiana: preachers and storytellers. He said, "For heaven's sake, be a storyteller. The world's got too many preachers."

That sort of gave me a sense that the best way to explain complicated things, like science—or the best way to explain moral issues, like gene editing—is through the stories of the people who are doing it and thinking about it. Using that kind of narrative storytelling to convey messages is as old as the Bible. That was an important influence in my childhood. That led me on a path to being a storyteller.

GR: When you read for pleasure, do you have any favorite genres or authors or guilty pleasures?

WI: I like Dave Eggers, in terms of fiction. I like Michael Lewis, in terms of nonfiction. And certainly I'm often reading to try to find my next subject, which at the moment, I don't know what it will be.

GR: Is there anything else you'd like to discuss or highlight about the book, anything in particular for readers who might want to check out the book?

WI: Well, I’ve always thought that there's real joy in figuring out how something works. That joy is something that all my characters have had, from Leonardo da Vinci to Einstein to Jennifer Doudna. And I think that joy is particularly strong when that something is ourselves.