PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn The Code Breaker [Isaacson] reprises several of his previous themes—science, genius, experiment, code, thinking different—and devotes a full length book to a female subject for the first time. Jennifer Doudna, a genuine heroine for our time, may be the code breaker of the book’s title, but she is only part of Isaacson’s story ... Isaacson devotes much anguished discussion to the ethics of gene editing, especially when it comes to \'germline\' changes that can be passed on through generations and \'enhancements\' such as green eyes or high I.Q. that prospective parents could insert into their offspring’s genomes ... This is a good place to start the story, because The Code Breaker is in some respects a journal of our 2020 plague year. By the final chapter, Isaacson has enrolled in a vaccine trial. Between the main character’s frantic road trip and the author’s rolled-up sleeve, there is room to explore Doudna’s childhood, trace her career, meet her competitors and collaborators, fret over the future fallout of the CRISPR revolution and marvel at its positive potential ... a handsome volume with color photos distributed generously throughout. While the pictures enhance the storytelling, the narrative flow is constantly interrupted by subheads and space breaks. Almost every spread includes one, as though admonishing the reader to pay attention ... Isaacson keeps a firm, experienced hand on the scientific explanations, which he mastered through extensive readings and interviews, all of which are footnoted.
Simon Winchester
PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Winchester covers more than 200 years of fine-tuning in this work, and corrals a large cast of eccentric individuals ... Personally, Mr. Winchester professes a preference, even a passion, for the imprecise ... Not all parts of the book fit precisely together. Mr. Winchester inserts many footnotes (appearing every few pages in some chapters) that supply all sorts of ancillary information: a line of poetry, a bit of historical background, a fine point of definition, an amusing factlet. But the footnotes are just as likely to contain pertinent material that could have, should have been incorporated into the main body of the text rather than relegated to a dozen or more lines of tiny type ... If we fail to accept the equal value of the natural order, the author warns, \'then nature will in time overrun ... none shall survive—no matter how precise\' ... brighter prospect glimmers in the interesting afterword that Mr. Winchester appends about metrology, the science of measurement. Here he offers a brief history of standard units such as the meter and the kilogram. The process cheers him considerably ... the \'duration by which, fundamentally, we measure everything that we make and use, and which in turn helps establish for us with unfailing exactitude the precision that allows the modern world to function.\'
Claire L. Evans
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewBoth A Lab of One’s Own and Broad Band — along with numerous other recent titles like Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shetterly — provide much needed perspective, along with presumed-absent foremothers and role models. As a genre, these true stories constitute a chorus of voices all saying the same thing: 'Yes, Virginia, there are women who do science.''
