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The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race QUOTES

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race QUOTES

1 " She felt at home in the lab. It was a quiet temple for individual persistence and contemplation. She could be creative and independent as she pursued a path toward her own discoveries. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

2 " seriously "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

3 " Never do something that a thousand other people are doing. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

4 " we have entered a third and even more momentous era, a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

5 " Asilomar’s lack of focus on ethical issues bothered many religious leaders. That prompted a letter to President Jimmy Carter signed by the heads of three major religious organizations: the National Council of Churches, the Synagogue Council of America, and the U.S. Catholic Conference. “We are rapidly moving into a new era of fundamental danger triggered by the rapid growth of genetic engineering,” they wrote. “Who shall determine how human good is best served when new life forms are being engineered?”13 These decisions should not be left to scientists, the trio argued. “There will always be those who believe it appropriate to ‘correct’ our mental and social structures by genetic means. This becomes more dangerous when the basic tools to do so are finally at hand. Those who would play God will be tempted as never before. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

6 " I think my blunt and contrary nature helps my science, because I don’t simply accept things just because other people believe it, "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

7 " Men ought not to play God before they learn to be men. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

8 " The beauty of nature and the joy that comes from unstructured human engagement is a powerful combination. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

9 " It was a bad day for viruses,” Moderna’s chair Afeyan says about the Sunday in November 2020 when he got the first word of the clinical trial results. “There was a sudden shift in the evolutionary balance between what human technology can do and what viruses can do. We may never have a pandemic again. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

10 " Two revolutions coincided in the 1950s. Mathematicians, including Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, showed that all information could be encoded by binary digits, known as bits. This led to a digital revolution powered by circuits with on-off switches that processed information. Simultaneously, Watson and Crick discovered how instructions for building every cell in every form of life were encoded by the four-letter sequences of DNA. Thus was born an information age based on digital coding (0100110111001…) and genetic coding (ACTGGTAGATTACA…). The flow of history is accelerated when two rivers converge. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

11 " Throughout human history, we have been subjected to wave after wave of viral and bacterial plagues. The first known one was the Babylon flu epidemic around 1200 BC. The plague of Athens in 429 BC killed close to 100,000 people, the Antonine plague in the second century killed ten million, the plague of Justinian in the sixth century killed fifty million, and the Black Death of the fourteenth century took almost 200 million lives, close to half of Europe’s population. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

12 " Much of the attention paid to CRISPR these days involves its potential to make inheritable (germline) edits in humans that will be passed along to all the cells of all of our future descendants and have the potential to alter our species. These edits are done in reproductive cells or early-stage embryos. This is what occurred with the CRISPR baby twins in China in 2018, and it is the controversial topic that I will discuss later in this book. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

13 " After more than three billion years of evolution of life on this planet, one species (us) had developed the talent and temerity to grab control of its own genetic future. There "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

14 " The invention of CRISPR and the plague of COVID will hasten our transition to the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

15 " The invention of CRISPR and the plague of COVID will hasten our transition to the third great revolution of modern times. These revolutions arose from the discovery, beginning just over a century ago, of the three fundamental kernels of our existence: the atom, the bit, and the gene. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

16 " The first half of the twentieth century, beginning with Albert Einstein’s 1905 papers on relativity and quantum theory, featured a revolution driven by physics. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

17 " The second half of the twentieth century was an information-technology era, based on the idea that all information could be encoded by binary digits—known as bits—and all logical processes could be performed by circuits with on-off switches. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

18 " Nature is beautiful. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

19 " The evolutionary process cares little about what happens to us after we have children and get them to a safe age, so there are a whole bunch of middle-aged maladies, including Huntington’s and most forms of cancer, that we humans would want to eliminate, even though nature sees no need to. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

20 " Great inventions come from understanding basic science. Nature is beautiful that way. "

― Walter Isaacson , The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race