"The Code Breaker " 에서

Walter Isaacson, "The Code Break: Jennifer Doudna,

Gene Editing, And The Future of the Human Race" (2021)

 

 

추천하고 싶은 책이다. 특히 한국의 고교생이나 대학 신입생들은

번역서가 아직 안 나왔으면 원서로 읽으면 좋을 것 같다.

 

박테리아가 30억년 동안 바이러스와 싸워 이겨온 방법을

발견, CRYSPR system 이라 이름 붙인 F. Mojica,

CRYSPR 를 이용한 유전자 편집(방법)을 제시한 2012년

논문으로 2020 노벨화학상을 수상한 E. Charpentier 와

J. Doudna, 사람에게도 적용 가능을 보인, 숨가쁜

선두 경쟁 끝에 나온, 2013년 1월의 다섯 논문

(Zang, Church, 1/3; Doudna, 김진수, Joung, 1/29),

RNA 백신(Moderna, Pfizer 백신), 생명윤리.

 

재밌다. 이 책 바로 전에 몰두해서 읽은 Mahfouz 의

중편소설집보다도 더 재밌었던 것 같다.

 

간단한 아이디어가 가져다주는 놀라운 결과가

과학의 재미란 생각이 든다.

 

 

Emmanuelle Charpentier (사진: Wikipedia)

 

 

Grand questions that our mortal minds may never be able to

answer: ... What is consciousness? Others may be wrestled into

submission by the end of this century: ... Do we have free will?

Of the real big ones, the closest to being solved is how life

began. (p 46)

 

One evening, when he[Francisco Mojica] was sure about his

discovery, he explained to his wife ... "I just discovered sometjing

really amazing," he said. "Bacteria have an immune system.

They're able to remember what viruses have attacked them in the

past." (p 74)

 

"I began to see myself as a scientist and not just as a student,"

she[Emmanuelle Charpentier] says. "I wanted to creat knowledge,

not just learn it." (p 121)

 

The Doudna-Charpentier paper, published online on June 28,

2012, galvanized an entire new field of biotechnology: making

CRISPR work in the editing of human genes. (p 149)

 

The Doudna-Charpentier paper in June 2012 set off a furious

sprint in many labs around the world, including Doudna's, to

prove that CRISPR-Cas9 could work in human cells. That triumph

was accomplished in five places in about six months. (p 156)

 

The primary concern is germline editing, those changes that are

done in the DNA of human eggs or sperm or early-stage

embryos so that every cell in the resulting children -- and all of

their descendants -- will cary the edited trait. (p 336)

 

The Awarding of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Doudna

and Charpentier was not a complete surprise, but the recognition

came with historic swiftness....The day before, Sir Roger Penrose

had shared the Nobel in physics for a discovery about black holes

he had made more than fifty years earlier.... "This year's prize is

about rewritting the code of life," the secretary general of the

Royal Swish Academy proclaimed.... "The genetic scissors have

taken the life science into a new epock." (p 469-70)