[MUSIC PLAYING] LEIGH GALLAGHER: Welcome
to this "Talks at Google" virtual event. I'm Leigh Gallagher, and I'm
Director of External Affairs here at Google. It's my great pleasure to
introduce today's guest, and I'm also a
long-time admirer. He is a renowned
journalist at heart, having served as the
editor-in-chief of "Time" and also as CEO of CNN
and the Aspen Institute. Walter is now back
in his hometown of New Orleans as a professor
of history at Tulane. But you may know him
best as an author, and it's quite possible you've
read one of his many books. He may be the best known
biographer we have today. His subjects include luminaries
like Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin,
Albert Einstein, and now the first woman, who is the
sole subject of his latest book. "The Code Breaker-- Jennifer Doudna, Gene
Editing, and the Future of the Human Race" tells
the gripping account of how Nobel Prize
winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues
launched the CRISPR revolution that will allow us to cure
diseases, fend off viruses, and improve the human species. It's a fascinating
book, and I want to make sure we get to
lots of audience questions. So as you think of questions
throughout the conversation, and we hope you will,
please be sure to add them to the live chat on the right. I also want to give a very
special thanks to Matt Bongiovi out of our London office. Matt brought this talk to
Google and was instrumental in its preparation, so
a big thank you to Matt. Walter Isaacson, it
is my great honor to welcome you to
"Talks at Google." WALTER ISAACSON:
Thank you very much. It's my great honor
to be with you, Leigh. We worked together in a
previous century at Time, Inc. And I admire your
book on Airbnb. You're a great journalist. Thanks. LEIGH GALLAGHER:
Thank you, Walter. Well, that means the
world coming from you. And it's true, we were
colleagues once upon a time. Well, it's great to
have you here today, and congratulations on the book. I guess first I have
to ask, how did you arrive at Jennifer
Doudna as a subject, especially given the broad
cast of characters involved in the discovery and the
development of CRISPR gene editing? WALTER ISAACSON:
Well, first, I decided I wanted to do something on the
revolution that was happening in the life sciences. Everybody on this
broadcast and podcast has been in the forefront
of the digital revolution, but the digital
revolution is now being joined by another form
of coding, the code of life, in which we're going to combine
computational biology together in order to create new
ways to make vaccines and to edit our own genes. And so around the year
2000, when the Human Genome Project finished sequencing
the human genome, you began to see this flowering
of the possibility of a life sciences revolution. And I was looking
for a way into it. I like writing narratives. I like writing
narratives about people. And so I went around
from lab to lab with George Church at
Harvard and Feng Zhang at MIT and Emmanuelle
Charpentier in Paris and got to know Jennifer
Doudna at Berkeley. And she seemed to be a very
interesting main character. All those other people
are important characters in the book, but she seemed to
tie together the whole thing, from the beginning of the
discovery of the structure of DNA when she was
in middle school and read "The Double Helix"
and became fascinated by Rosalind Franklin,
the woman in the book who did the imaging that leads to
this structure of DNA for Jim Watson and Francis
Crick, all the way through figuring
out the role of RNA in creating life on our
planet to RNA as a guide to use for gene editing
and now RNA as a messenger to build proteins for a
vaccine, like the spike protein for the coronavirus. And finally, she's
the one who's been at the forefront of wrestling
with the moral issues involved. So those of us who like to try
to personalize a narrative-- you know, we look for a
great central character. And the more I got to know
her, and the more I liked her, the more I realized she was
the perfect central character. LEIGH GALLAGHER: She was it. So this is sort of a process
question, which I of course love, but what is the process
of getting cooperation, in this case but
also in general? Have you had cooperation from
all of your past subjects? I mean, the living ones I guess. WALTER ISAACSON:
Well, sure, I lived with Steve Jobs
at his guesthouse for much of the time, especially
the last year of his life. And I'm an old
journalist like you, so I kind of know that if
you call people and you say, I'd like to talk about you, most
people would be really happy, because that's the most
interesting subject in the world to them, is to be
able to talk about themselves. And so even when I called Feng
Zhang, who is a great rival and competitor of
Jennifer Doudna, and I said I was writing
a book with Jennifer as the main character,
he was eager to talk. He invited to me into his
lab at Kendall Square. You know, we spent a
lot of time together, even went to Quebec together
and out to dinner, where CRISPR research was being done. So I don't find it very
hard getting people to talk. And you know,
journalists who grew up as I did in the '80s and
'90s, we spent a lot of time just hanging out and
getting people to talk. That helps make it a
narrative, helps make the book a journey of discovery, because
you can watch in real time how real people are
discovering things. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Absolutely. So we've read a lot about
it, and you've touched on it, but can you just
explain what CRISPR is and how it's used
for gene editing? WALTER ISAACSON: Well,
CRISPR, is something bacteria have been using for more
than a billion years. So it's pretty simple. They're not all that smart. But what they do is whenever
they get attacked by a virus, they take a little
mug shot of it, a little snippet of the
genetic material of the virus, and they incorporate it in these
clustered, repeated sequences in their own genetic code. And they're called CRISPRs. And so if the virus
ever attacks again, they've got this
mug shot, and they can use an enzyme
to cut it up, just a pair of molecular
scissors to cut it up. Well, this turns out to
be pretty useful in an era when we seem to be getting
attacked by wave after wave of virus variants. But when Jennifer Doudna
and Emmanuelle Charpentier discovered the components
of this system, the essential
components, they realized that they could reprogram it. Everybody on this-- I
don't have to explain reprogramming to this crowd. But that makes it
into a molecule that can be like a microchip. If you want to reprogram
it so that it's not simply attacking the genetic
code of a virus, you can say, OK, I want you
to cut up our own genetic code at this spot. I want you to target
this sequence of our DNA. So maybe I can target it
so I can change the hair colors of my children
or, you know, take out a mutation
that causes sickle cell. So that's what they
discovered, was how to reprogram and
repurpose and re-engineer this ancient system
bacteria have called CRISPR in order to make it into a
tool that would edit human DNA. LEIGH GALLAGHER:
It's pretty amazing. And can you talk to us for
a minute about how exactly CRISPR technology has
been used in the fight against the coronavirus,
how critical it was in the development
of the vaccines? WALTER ISAACSON: Well,
the basic technology and the basic
science involves RNA. And we all know about
DNA because that's the famous molecule that
gets on magazine covers. But RNA is actually
the worker molecule. DNA just sits in the nucleus
of our cells curating information-- we all know
famous people like that-- whereas RNA goes and
takes that information and does things with it. The two major
things RNA can do-- one is act as a guide for an
enzyme to cut or do something, and that's what happens
with gene editing. It can also act as a messenger
to go to the manufacturing region of our cells and say,
manufacture this protein. And that's what happens in
the basic dogma of biology. The basic life is that
at any moment messenger RNAs are going from the DNA
and the nucleus of our cells and saying, make
this hair follicle, or make this fingernail,
or this hormone, or this enzyme, or this neuron,
or, in the case of the vaccines for the coronavirus, make this
fragment of the spike protein so you can stimulate
our immune systems to fight it if the real spike
protein and its coronavirus comes along. So we use it for
messenger RNA vaccines. We can use CRISPR to directly
kill virus in our system, but we still need to
perfect how to deliver it into the right cells. And it's already also being
used as a detection technology. So we're now rolling
out these home CRISPR kits that can detect any
genetic sequence, including that of the
coronavirus, and it's like a home pregnancy test. You can do it, and
instantly you can know. And those will be available
in the next few months, not only for coronavirus,
but everything from strep throat to
bacterial infections or to detect a cancer
tumor that you may have had sequenced to see
if it's coming back. So this will change
biology, by having this reprogrammable systems
that we can use to detect, to destroy, and vaccinate
against things we don't want. LEIGH GALLAGHER: You know, I
heard you say in an interview that-- you know, you knew this
really significant, obviously. You chose to write
a book about it. But you said after you
got into the research, you felt that you had
even understated it, like it was even bigger
than you thought, right? I mean-- WALTER ISAACSON: Well, you know,
I went to my editor and said, I want to do a book
on a technology with an acronym
nobody can remember led by a woman whose last name
most people can't pronounce and have never heard of. But I said, trust
me, this technology's going to be important. But after coronavirus, after
Jennifer Doudna wins the Nobel Prize, and after we've edited
the embryos of babies in China to produce designer babies,
it suddenly became clear to me that this was even more
exciting and also more important than I had originally thought. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Absolutely. So you mentioned the babies
that were born in China. I was going to ask
you about that. Obviously, CRISPR presents
so much potential, but it also presents
moral, ethical questions, and the capability of
making precise changes to the human genome and all the
kinds of difficult questions around that. Can you just tell us, at
first, about those babies? And what was that story, and
why was it so controversial? WALTER ISAACSON: There was a
young Chinese scientist named He Jiankui, and he came to
a lot of Jennifer Doudna's conferences in
the United States, even has a selfie that he took
with her at Cold Spring Harbor Labs when they were
there together. But then he goes back to
China, and in an experiment that wasn't really
authorized, he edited the embryos of unborn,
what became twin girls. And when you do
that, you're not only making an edit in
the twin girls, you're making an
inheritable edit that will be in all
their reproductive cells, their children, all
of their descendants. So in effect, you're
editing the human race. And what he did was
he edited their DNA to take out the
receptor for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. And there was a whole
lot of shock and awe, because making
inheritable edits-- that was a line we had not
crossed as a human species. And even the Chinese
decided that what he did was premature and wrong,
and he was arrested. And he's in jail. But the pandemic maybe
opens our minds a bit, that we're not quite ready
to do inheritable edits, but the notion of
using CRISPR to make us less susceptible to viruses-- well, that doesn't seem quite
as appalling as it did a year and a half ago. LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's amazing. I also read recently
that Vladimir Putin talked about suggesting
that you could use CRISPR to create
soldiers that don't feel pain or don't feel fear. What can you tell us about that? Is that just sort of
an out-there idea? WALTER ISAACSON: No, the DARPA,
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is
the biggest funder of the labs at MIT and at
Berkeley for many reasons, one of which is, yes, you could make
soldiers that are impervious, say, to radiation sickness. And, you know, Putin went
even further and said, maybe they'll be
impervious to pain. You can also do what DARPA,
the Defense Department here in the US, is doing,
which is say, well, let's create anti-CRISPR, which
is just what it sounds like. Just like we and the Russians
have ballistic missiles, we also have
anti-ballistic missiles. And this would be a way
to turn off a CRISPR edit. Or more specifically,
if you used CRISPR to, say, edit mosquitoes
and have a gene drive so you make a whole
platoon of mosquitoes that can carry a pathogen, so we
have to do defense against this as well. LEIGH GALLAGHER: And you talk-- I don't want to get too
granular, but at the same time, I think this is really
interesting-- you talk about two
different types of edits that can be done with
CRISPR, somatic cell edits and germline edits. Can you walk us through
the primary difference between the two of
those and the impact? WALTER ISAACSON:
Well, germline is what we just discussed about He
Jiankui and the Chinese doctor. And it means that you're making
edits in reproductive cells so that those are inherited. So it's a pretty simple concept. If you cross the
germline, it means you're making inheritable edits. That's a line you
may not want to cross for pretty obvious reasons. Somatic edits just means
in the body of the patient. And that's been done quite
a bit with no controversy. For example, last
year a woman named Victoria Gray had the stem cells
of her blood edited so she no longer had sickle cell disease. And she gave consent. It's not an inheritable edit. So I think one of the
first ethical lines in using CRISPR is, let's
start with the edits that are in patients that
give their consent. And let's draw a line
right now at what you called the germline, which is-- even though the Chinese
doctor has done it, we should hit pause before
we do more inheritable edits. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Does a
question of if we're not-- maybe this only applies to
the germline edits, but if we're no longer subject
to a random natural lottery when it comes to our
endowments, is it possible that that could weaken
our feelings of empathy and acceptance? WALTER ISAACSON: Well, yes. I mean, when we have
a species that's filled with people
tall and short and fat and skinny and straight
and gay and trans, and that wonderful
diversity is what makes our species
both resilient, but colorful and creative,
and we have empathy because we know that
maybe somebody who was born blind or born with
a genetic defect or even with a genetic
disease, that it's all part of a random lottery. And we have to be
empathetic to those who got dealt, maybe, sickle
cell anemia or something. And that's why we
fight such diseases. But I think there are
a couple of problems that come if we start
doing edits that are inheritable to our species. One is that maybe the rich
would be able to buy-- [COUGHS] excuse me-- better
genes for their children, and we'd have a genetic leap
like in "Brave New World" or in "Gattaca." And another is that-- [COUGHS] excuse me,
I'm sorry, excuse me-- that we'd edit out the
diversity of our species, and that would also
be problematic. So I think those are reasons we
should have moral qualms, not about CRISPR, but
about how we use it and who we decide can use it. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Absolutely. It's just really--
the issues it raises are just, as you mentioned,
just very significant. You mentioned a few questions
back just the distinction between the digital revolution,
which of course we're all familiar with, and the
life science revolution. I mean, which do you think will
end up being more important? And it's OK if you
say the latter. WALTER ISAACSON:
Well, it actually will be the combination of the
digital revolution and the life science revolution. People like Cameron
Myhrvold, who's the son of Nathan
Myhrvold, who was one of the great chief
technology officers at Microsoft, if I
can mention that word, but his son is both a
computational wizard and a genetic wizard. And that type of
computational biology will probably be the future. I have a little
thought experiment, which is, in the same
class at Harvard was Mark Zuckerberg and Feng Zhang. Feng Zhang is the
person in my book who's a great
competitor to Jennifer Doudna and first
shows how CRISPR can be used in human cells. It'll be interesting to
know 25 years from now, will Feng Zhang's
discovery of how to use CRISPR in human
cells or Mark Zuckerberg's invention of Facebook-- what will have been more
important to our species? LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's amazing. That could be a follow-up book. Do you see the future
of bioengineering belonging to hackers
and hobbyists, or professionals,
or a combination? WALTER ISAACSON: Well, I think
the digital revolution was pushed forward by people on the
electronic frontier, the cyber hackers who, you know,
as Steve Jobs would say, they were crazy ones,
misfits, and rebels, but people crazy enough to
think they can change the world are the ones who do. So in the 1970s, you had
a hobbyist hacker culture at places like the
Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, in
which people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
and Bill Gates hung out with their Altair machines and
writing Basic for the Altair. And they pushed the digital
revolution forward in ways that IBM and DEC Computer
and others weren't doing. So I always think
it's the people on the frontier, sometimes the
hackers, that push us forward. Now obviously, when you're
hacking human genes, that's probably
a little bit more difficult to do in your garage. And also, it might cause
a little bit more cause for concern than when you're
hacking Basic for the Intel microprocessor. But I have in my book a
very interesting character, Josiah Zayner, who is
one of these biohackers and has created CRISPR
treatments that I've watched him inject into himself
to, say, increase muscle mass by regulating myostatin. And he created his
own DNA vaccine that he injected into himself. And even though I'm
not quite somebody who would go into his garage
and do those injections, it made me sign up
for the Pfizer trial, because I think citizens
should be involved in science. We should all do what we can. And I find that the hackers,
just like Josiah Zayner is in my book a little
bit like Puck is in "A Midsummer
Night's Dream." He pops up every
now and then when everybody else is wringing
their hands to say, you know, "What fools
these mortals be." And he offends
people, but, you know, "If these shadows have
offended, think but this and all is mended." We need people like this
pushing the human race forward. LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's amazing. I love the Shakespearean link. That's incredible. I want to ask you about your
just incredible body of work. So you know, so many
of the characters you've written about-- Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Ben
Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci-- they were all innovators and
are described as geniuses. But what other common
traits do they have? What is the common thread
that you've observed? WALTER ISAACSON: Well, people
always say they're smart, but man, anybody on this
broadcast, anybody at Google, has met a lot of smart people. And you end up knowing
that smart people are a dime a dozen, and they
don't really amount to much. What matters is being
imaginative or creative, or as Steve Jobs would say,
being able to think out of the box and think different. And I think the basic
ingredient for that that all of the characters
I've written about share is just curiosity, pure
curiosity, not curiosity driven by the need to create a product
or something, but curiosity for its own sake. You know, Leonardo
da Vinci writing in the margin of his
notebook, why is the sky blue? He doesn't need that
to paint the Mona Lisa. But he tested out spraying water
in the air and purified water and trying to figure
out, why is the sky blue? That struck me, because
that's in Einstein's notebook. Why is the sky blue? And he experiments with
Lord Rayleigh's formula and gets us another step ahead. Jennifer Doudna, as a young
girl growing up in Hilo, Hawaii, marveling at the blue
sky and wondering how the sunset turns it pink. Also, like Leonardo marveling
about why the water spirals when it passes rocks and how
the Fibonacci's equations and other mathematical
brushstrokes show you that it's the same with
the curls of a seashell or the curls of the Mona Lisa. Now, we all have that curiosity
when we're in our wonder years, but it gets beaten out of
us by grown-ups who say, quit asking so many
silly questions. I think that what separates
the people I wrote about-- Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna,
Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, and of course Leonardo-- is they don't outgrow
their wonder years. They're always curious
about basic things in nature for curiosity's sake. Leonardo had a jotting
in one of his notebooks-- "Describe the tongue
of a woodpecker." And that inspired me,
because I realized, who would want to know what the
tongue of-- what use is knowing the-- but Leonardo did. And he had to find a
woodpecker, open its mouth. And so it inspired
me that every day I should find 10 or 12
odd things that I'm passionately curious about. LEIGH GALLAGHER:
That's incredible. Do you think some
of that is innate? It's something we're either
born with or we're not? I mean, obviously all children,
as you said, have curiosity, but do you think that
passionate curiosity is, you either have it or you don't? Or do you really think it can
be-- it's there in all of us? WALTER ISAACSON:
Well, as somebody who's just written about the
importance of the genetic code, I should say it's innate,
but I don't think it is. I think there are certain
things that are innate somehow. You know, Einstein's
mental processing power-- no matter how hard we try,
we're probably not going-- except for a few
people listening here-- going to equal his
mathematical processing power. On the other hand,
curiosity, I think, is something that
comes in our childhood, because we're just
fascinated by things. And I think it's not necessarily
innate, but it's natural, meaning we all have a
certain amount of curiosity. And I think it's
something we can learn to nurture in ourselves,
we can help grow in ourselves. There's probably a limit to
the amount of mathematical or, in my case, musical
talent that I might ever have, but I can nurture
my own curiosity. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Just
thinking about all the parents on the call thinking,
how do I get this-- how can my child-- WALTER ISAACSON: Well,
step one is to quit saying, don't ask so many
dumb questions. I watched it in the airport when
I flew back here to New Orleans last night and there was a
kid mesmerized by all the neon signs in the new airport
and the wonderful lights and asking this,
that, and the other. And finally, I hear
the parent say, quit asking so many dumb questions. And I realized, we can all
nurture it in our kids. We just have to wait
for three more questions before we say that
horrible phrase. LEIGH GALLAGHER: You
didn't go over and say, this could be the
next Jennifer Doudna? WALTER ISAACSON: Exactly. LEIGH GALLAGHER: As a
former journalist myself, I'm fascinated to
know a little bit more about your process of how
you go about your research when you dive into
a project like this. So when you first
select a new subject, what is your first--
the first thing you do? And are you already thinking
about the next person? WALTER ISAACSON:
Well, I'm always gathering string about people
who I could write about down the road. And there are two
types of books I do, which have separate processes. One is somebody who's
alive, and one is somebody who's been historical. After I wrote about
Henry Kissinger, which was a long time ago,
my first book, he was such a handful
to deal with, I said next time I'm going
to write about somebody who's been dead for 250 years. So I did Benjamin Franklin. Likewise, after Steve Jobs,
it's like, OK, now somebody 500 years dead, Leonardo. If it's somebody who
is a historical figure, I go read everything
that they wrote. I read all of
Leonardo's notebooks. I read Einstein's
notebooks and grapple with his scientific papers,
all of Ben Franklin's letters, which were-- now, online, it's easier, but I
spent time at the Yale library going through box
after box of letters. When it's somebody alive, I
read all the background material as fast as I can
and then just start hanging out with them, not even
with a whole set of questions, just sort of saying, hey,
tell me about yourself, and letting them talk. And I feel I should
do that in person over long periods of time. I kind of, as I said, moved into
a guesthouse of Steve Jobs's. I moved into
Berkeley, California, with my friend Michael
Lewis, who's a New Orleans author as well who lives
right near the campus, so I could just go
every day to the lab where Jennifer and all of
her colleagues were working. LEIGH GALLAGHER: And do you do
all the research, in whatever form it takes, and then stop
and then do all the writing, or is it not as cut
and dried as that? WALTER ISAACSON: Well,
one of the things I learned from my great
but unfortunately late editor Alice Mayhew was,
make it a narrative. Make it storytelling. As she said, the Bible has
the best lead sentence. It begins, "In the
beginning," comma, and you go chronologically
telling the tales of morality and discovery through people. Make it a journey of discovery. So what I do is I gather
all the information and I put it on a huge Google
Doc that can be shared. And I do it both as a
Google Doc and in Dropbox, because I'm kind of paranoid. I want to make sure I've
got many copies of things. But then people can add
to it if they have things. But I keep it
strictly chronological so that when I begin writing,
I make it a narrative storytelling, because
something that happens, say, to Jennifer Doudna in graduate
school, when her advisor says, always ask the big
questions, and she says, what is the big question
about RNA, and he says, how did life begin
on this planet-- well, that affects what she does
next when she gets to Berkeley. So I keep it chronological. And yes, once I start
writing, I'm still reporting. And halfway through this book-- by the end of 2019, I had
half the book written, I was writing along, and
then coronavirus struck. And then the babies
had been born in China. And so I go back to
reporting, and I say, OK, let's extend this book
for another couple of years, because we're going to
have to turn our attention to the coronavirus. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Yeah,
and what other ways did the pandemic and the
coronavirus impact your process for this book? WALTER ISAACSON: Well,
one interesting way is that instead of
hanging out in the labs, I hung around in
the Slack channels and in the Zoom meetings
of Jennifer Doudna and of Feng Zhang
and of Emmanuelle Charpentier and George Church. And I got to report
in real time. Instead of asking
questions like, what did you think when
you first discovered that this guide RNA could be
combined into a single guide, I got to watch as
they discovered, you know, how do we use such
a guide to make a detection tool for the coronavirus? And I'm there as they're sort of
doing it in the Slack channel, putting up experimental results. I'm there in the meeting
that evening on Zoom when they're talking about it. So the book gets to take on a
flavor of real-time adventure, as I don't know
and they don't know how the next experiment's
going to turn out, but I'm getting to
report it in real time. LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's amazing. And I wonder, if it
were normal times-- I mean, you might
not have been let into every single physical room. Or certainly, you
would have been-- people would have noticed
more if, oh, Walter's here. There might be a benefit
to having, you know, being able to just sit
in a virtual meeting. WALTER ISAACSON: That's true. But I tell you,
having been vaccinated and traveling a lot
right now, I love being with people in person. I think there's just
more you get out of it. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Absolutely. And what is Jennifer
like as a subject? I mean, we can read
about her in the book, but this is a big deal
for someone like her. I mean, obviously she had
achieved notoriety before, but what was she
like as a subject? WALTER ISAACSON:
Well, she has one flaw as a central character. Unlike Steve Jobs or even
Einstein or Leonardo, she doesn't-- she's just nice. She doesn't have a
dark side, you know, or rough edges that
can get her in-- now, she's competitive. She's still in a patent battle
with Feng Zhang and the Broad Institute. She's very ambitious. But I consider those
attributes, not flaws, to be ambitious and competitive. She's genuinely nice
and very grounded. I mean, you know, she has
now this book out on her that's doing well,
the Nobel Prize, and the coronavirus thing. And yet she's just
like me and you. She's easy to talk to, always,
although tightly scheduled, always seems to have time
to look you in the eye or to help mentor
somebody who wants advice. So she has that perfect match
of something everybody at Google would know, which is the need
for competition and cooperation to be interwoven. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Can you
talk about that a little bit, just that rivalry and the race
for discoveries between her and Feng Zhang a little
bit, since we didn't really touch on it? WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah,
after June of 2012 when Emmanuel
Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna published their
paper on how you can engineer CRISPR to cut DNA-- that's done in a test tube using
cells that are from bacteria and other organisms like that. The question is, will
it work in human beings? And if you're a
patent lawyer, you know that there's a term
of art called obviousness. And it's just what it sounds
like, which is, was it obvious that if it worked in this test
tube in the bacteria cells, it would also work
in human cells? Well, they raced to show it
could work in human cells. And there's almost a dead
heat, a photo finish. Six months later,
in January 2013, Feng Zhang publishes a paper
the first week of January saying, here's how you
optimize the system to work in human cells. So does George Church,
his former advisor when he was a graduate student. And that's a great rivalry
and bitterness there, because Feng Zhang did
not tell George Church that he was competing
against him, that he was racing against him, to
make this work in humans. And finally, Jennifer Doudna
publishes two weeks later. And they all get patents,
but the patents conflict. So they're all fighting
these patent battles. But the good thing is, when
they all turned their attention to fighting the coronavirus
instead of fighting over priority of
publication or of patents or of prizes, they've put
them on public servers to be in the public
domain, saying, we're not-- we've just made this discovery
about a detection tool or how to use an enzyme
to cut the coronavirus, and we're putting it
in the public domain so anybody can use it for free. So I think that helped
remind all of them that although they're in
it for patents and prizes and publications,
they're also in it to help the human
species, and they're in it for noble reasons. LEIGH GALLAGHER: For the
greater good, absolutely. WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah. LEIGH GALLAGHER: So I
want to remind everyone that you can enter your
questions in the chat. We'll get to them
in just a minute. I have one or two more
questions before we do. Kind of picking up on what
you were just talking about, Walter, based on having
immersed yourself in this topic, I'm wondering what
your thoughts are on to what extent discoveries
depend on individual genius and to what extent teamwork
has become more critical? WALTER ISAACSON: Yes, teamwork
has become more critical, whether it's in creating
the algorithms at Google or creating the ways
to do biotechnology, because you need teams,
including the one Jennifer formed, if you're going
to do CRISPR, that have people understand microorganisms,
but also people understand chemistry and people
understand structural biology and the structure of molecules. And those teams all
pool their resources. And patents and prizes
tend to be distorting, because the prizes have to
go to two or three people, and the patents have to go
to one primary inventor. And that distorts the
collaboration that really pushes science forward. That said, even
though it's all-- that creativity is a
collaborative process, and innovation's
a team sport, it gets pushed forward
by people who have a particular passion,
a particular insight. You know, it took a lot of
people to create Google, but without Sergey and
Larry, it wouldn't have been pushed the way it was pushed. And so I always, whether it's-- I wrote a book called
"The Innovators," which is about teamwork in
the digital revolution, but also, I wrote
about Steve Jobs, because even though he said
his greatest product was the team he created at Apple,
it was him who really touched the surface of history
with his fingers and it sent out the ripples. So I like showing that mix of
individual initiative and then collaborative teamwork. LEIGH GALLAGHER: So when I was
a journalist back at "Fortune," I spent a lot of time
studying women leaders. And there's a whole
body of research on how they lead differently. And I'm just wondering--
and being more collaborative is one thing, and these
have been proven out with research and everything. But having written about
so many innovative men and then writing about Jennifer
as the first female subject of a book of yours, do you
think there are anything-- did she bring anything
additional to the table by virtue of being a woman? WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, I
mean, she faced headwinds because she was a woman. She had a school counselor told
her, girls don't do science. So she has a certain
insecurity that came from that, but also
a certain persistence, because she decided to persist. She's very collegial. I try not to make
sweeping generalizations or "seven secrets of success"
type pronouncements in my book, because I just write
narratives about real people. I know the stuff you're talking
about at "Fortune" that you read and worked on about who are
more collaborative as leaders. Certainly, Jennifer and
Emmanuel Charpentier and Jillian Banfield, the
women in this book, they were very,
very collaborative, in a friendly, collegial
way, and that helped them. But also, they had a
particular strength because they had been locked
out or somewhat excluded from the Human
Genome Project, which was a whole lot of alpha males,
people like Francis Collins and Craig Venter
and Eric Lander, all sequencing the human
genome in the 1990s. And people like Jillian Banfield
and Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer decided
to focus on RNA. Partly, Jennifer
said, it was not just because she was a
woman, but she said when she used to play
soccer as a kid, everybody used to run for
the ball, probably the boys more than the girls. And she loved to play a position
on the field where she could see the whole field to be
where the other people weren't. And so likewise she goes
and does RNA research. So I have a lot
in my book that'll be primary grist for people who
want to write these stories of, are women more collaborative? Are women more thinking
out of the box? Are men more aggressive? I kind of let the reader
make that decision. I just tell the story of
three very interesting women, four or five very
interesting guys, and the race they had to
alter the human species. LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's amazing. You tell it like
no one else can. OK, I think we're going
to go to the questions, so I think we're ready to put
the first one up on the screen. This is from John Singer. "Thank you for your
time today, Walter. I look forward to
reading your new book. I'm curious what
personality slash habitual similarities did
you observe between Dr. Doudna and Steve Jobs?" Good question. WALTER ISAACSON: Good question. Not all that many,
meaning Steve Jobs had what was famously called
the reality distortion field. He pushed people like crazy. He drove them crazy,
but he also drove them to do things that they
didn't know they could do. And I watched him
put together teams. And he liked to
put together teams that had creative tension,
in which people were really elbows out and jostling
with each other. Jennifer-- when I watched
her build teams at her labs at Berkeley and her
companies, she made sure that any new person that
would come in as a postdoc or as an employee would meet
everybody else on the team, and they'd all go out to dinner. And the team would decide
whether they fit in. And I asked her, I said, Steve
Jobs used to do the opposite. He'd want people who would
upset the apple cart, who would challenge the
thinking of the team, who would be abrasive, at
times, as Steve was. And I said, aren't you going to
lose out on that abrasiveness that might cause
creative tension? And she said, yes, maybe so, but
this is my way of doing teams. I like people to trust each
other, to stay up all night and have each other's back
when it comes to experiments. So I think the
differences are probably greater than the similarities. And if we had all day, I
could talk about the passion they had for details. They both knew to
ask the big picture, like, what could we do if we
had a personal computer you could take out of the
box and just plug in? What if we had 1,000
songs in our pocket? What if we could
edit our own DNA? But they also were passionate
enough for perfection that they knew that
God was in the details. It was how did
that protein fold, or how the shape of the RNA
made it a key to its function, or in Steve's case, how did
the chamfers on this iPhone curve in a way to make
it human friendly, so that it felt like
you could connect to it? So I think asking
the big picture but knowing God is in the
details is a attitude that they shared. So now I've given you
something they didn't share and something they did. LEIGH GALLAGHER:
Something they did. That-- WALTER ISAACSON: And
I can thank Mr. Singer for that good question. LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's
a great question. All right, let's see
what we have next. Let's take the next question
from Preethi Raghavan. "How do you go about learning
about complex subjects so quickly? How do you organize
all the information?" Great question. WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah,
I actually love science. My father was an engineer, my
uncle, my cousin, my brother. You know, when I was doing
the technology books, it was fun, because we had
a basement workshop where I had to sort out
all the transistors. I'm not sure anybody
on this meeting will know what a transistor
is, but they're the things-- LEIGH GALLAGHER: I do. WALTER ISAACSON: --you
etch on microchips. But the difference between
a capacitor and a resistor, or a condenser as they're
sometimes-- and all these things. So I had a feel for
how circuits worked. And I'm not, obviously,
a great engineer myself, but I'm totally in love with
circuits and engineering. Likewise, just like
Jennifer Doudna's father gave her "The Double Helix"
when she was in sixth grade, my dad here in New Orleans gave
me a copy of "The Double Helix" when I was in middle school. I just found it not too long
ago in the pale red cover. It would be worth something
on eBay except for it has all my marginal
scratches defining words I didn't know,
like biochemistry. So I've always been
interested in science. And I think one
problem with science is that most
scientists aren't very good at explaining
to the average person the beauty of what they do. And part of that
started with Einstein. You know, up until
Einstein, people like Ben Franklin or
Thomas Jefferson or Edison would think you were
a philistine if you didn't keep up with science. But Einstein made it
seem a little scary, a little difficult,
that you had to be Einstein to understand it. So I decided to write
a book about him that I hope demystified
the science a bit by showing in a narrative
way how he made each step. And biochemistry
wasn't that hard. I love it. And even some of the
technology, digital technology, I love it and can do. The hardest thing
I ever did was I had to take courses
in tensor calculus because I wanted to
understand the math underlying general relativity,
which is a tensor calculus, and how the fabric of
space time bends and folds in an iterative way
with moving objects. And then I left all the
math out of the book. But I felt I had to learn that. And that was a
year of struggling to learn the fundamentals
of tensor calculus. LEIGH GALLAGHER: My God. Your readers are grateful to you
because you did all that work-- WALTER ISAACSON:
And I left it out. LEIGH GALLAGHER: --so that
you would be able to-- right, but you would
be able to understand it to communicate
what you needed to to them, which is the art. Let's see another
question, please. From Amar Vedi, "Hey, Walter. We have a problematic history
with the social and scientific history of eugenics. How do we avoid our missteps? Is regulation possible?" WALTER ISAACSON: First
of all, regulation is possible I mean, it's
not like the atom bomb, which is very hard to
build in your basement. I mean, even I could
do CRISPR editing. But we regulate drugs. We regulate vaccines. The FDA-- and
Jennifer, in my book there's a whole process of her
gathering Chinese scientists from the National Academy
there, Duanqing Pei, who I went over and talked to, also
the British and the Europeans. So we could have international
guidelines and regulations on the use of CRISPR
technology, especially when it comes to inheritable edits. And yeah, there'd be some
people who might violate it, but you could keep it
95% contained, which is all you really have to do. But when you talk
about eugenics, you're talking about
state-sponsored eugenics, obviously the Nazi
program being the one that is just so gruesome. But even in the United States,
in the early 20th century, at Cold Spring Harbor
Lab, there was eugenics based on state ideas for how
to create a better, you know, citizenry. I don't think we have
that problem now, because I don't think the state
will ever mandate any eugenics. But here's a concept
you should think about, which is free market eugenics. If we allow it totally to
be up to the individual, and you could go into fertility
clinics or other places and be given a shopping
list as if you're at a genetic supermarket,
and we allow free choice, so we allow parents to say,
yeah, I'd like 6 inches taller, I'd like more IQ points,
I'd like blonde hair, I'd like this
sexual orientation, I don't want this skin color,
I don't want this eye color, whatever, then you could
see how we could end up-- and the thought experiments
are through the book where I try to go hand in
hand with the readers and the religious leaders
and the politicians to say, if we leave this totally
to the free market and allow everybody to buy
better genes for their children if they can afford
them, you will have a eugenics that has
some of the same outcomes as state-sponsored eugenics. But it will be a liberal free
market or libertarian eugenics. So I want readers to do that
thought experiment as well. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Absolutely. I think we have at
least one more question. Let's see if we can
take one or two more. From Nipen Mody, "Out of
all the historical figures you have researched, whom
would you like to meet most?" WALTER ISAACSON:
I think Leonardo. He was the person who
best knew everything you could possibly learn
about every subject that was knowable. And to me, when you
mentioned earlier what are the secrets of
success that they share, that's another one,
which is trying to understand the humanities
as well as the sciences, to understand the liberal
arts as well as engineering. Steve Jobs always ended
his product presentation with that intersection
of the street signs of the liberal arts
intersecting with technology. And if you love-- as Leonardo did, as Ben Franklin
did, as Jennifer Doudna did, as Steve Jobs did-- everything from,
to take Steve Jobs, you know, dance and
calligraphy and music as well as engineering and
circuits and microprocessors, or like Leonardo, you love
art and anatomy as well as math and medicine and music and
zoology, then you see patterns. And those patterns ripple
across the beauty of nature. You see the patterns
of the swirling water and the curls of the hair
and of the math of those curls. And so people who see
those patterns, to me, are the most creative. And Leonardo is the
exemplar of that. And plus, he'd be a good
person to have around. He liked to drink. He liked song. He liked amusement. He liked role-playing games. He loved life. And so I'd rather have
dinner with him, I think. LEIGH GALLAGHER: I would, too. Sounds great. OK, let's see another question. From Mike Thramann, "What
is the toughest challenge that you face
during the research of contemporary subjects?" WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, one
of the difficult challenges is these are real people. And Steve Jobs, those of
you who've read the book know he had a lot
of rough edges. He could be a jerk at times. There's a technical term
out in Silicon Valley that begins with an A, and he
could be that at times. And you want to put that in,
but you don't want to overdo it, because that's not who he was. It wasn't just
that he was a jerk. In fact, sometimes pushing
people and being aggressive is what pushed the
greatness into people. But you're dealing
with a real person, especially in the case
of Steve Jobs, somebody who was sick and then dying. And so you want to
leave out certain things that you think just might
be interpreted wrong and, you know, bad. But you also want to
paint the full picture. I think there are certain
biographers and journalists who are very good at just
being tough as nails and not worrying about what
a living person may think, or their family, but I
care about those things. So I sometimes have the problem
of not wanting to really piss off people that
I'm writing about, yet also wanting to get the
truth in its unvarnished form into the book. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Absolutely. Well, I'll just close with
two more questions of my own, just before we let you go. Since you're here at Google,
I have to ask you this. Is there a Google product
that you can't live without? WALTER ISAACSON: Well, many. I mean, first of
all, I marvel, as I had ever since it was
called PageRank and BackRub after Larry Page, at how the
algorithm for search at Google is just so much better, and you
know, that iterative process of making it better. And I teach the digital
revolution in my class at Tulane, and we
talk about monopolies. And I say sometimes a
monopoly is totally valid. Not that Google Search is
necessarily a monopoly, but it's a dominant field. And I'm sure there are people
questioning on the antitrust. But it's totally valid,
because it was earned by creating a better product. And the law permits that, but
we permit that as a society. So I mean, I could not
live without Google Search. I was just on an island the
past week with some friends, and we didn't have really good-- and anytime we were
having a conversation, we'd almost grab for
our phones and want to do a Google search
to figure something out. And when you couldn't,
your fingers get itchy. I love Google Docs
as well, and I'm just blown away by Google Maps. I can't quite figure out
how every single corner and every single
building on this speck of a Caribbean island
is there on Google Maps. And the combination of
mapping technology and GPS-- I'm not just saying this
because I'm on a Google call. I will have to do
a Microsoft call and I'll say, hey,
Bing didn't cut it, and why aren't you into maps? And my god, you built the
Zune instead of the iPhone. But Google products,
those three are ones I couldn't live without. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Well, those
are three amazing ones. And there's a lot of people
who work very hard on those. And I love how you pulled
out the Search in particular, because people work
so hard on Search. There's a saying
among the Search team that Search is a problem
that will never be solved, and I loved that when I
heard it because it really-- WALTER ISAACSON: You know,
when I was doing coronavirus, what really stunned me-- take the word "spike." You know, the word "spike"
is something we've used-- and all of a
sudden, Google knows that when I'm searching with
the words "spike" and "protein," I'm not looking for a spike
and a hot dog on top of it. It suddenly gives
me all the papers on the coronavirus's shell. And how quickly Google Search
can adapt to changing things. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Well, that was
a natural language processing milestone that was achieved,
something called BERT that I-- there are people on
this call far better than me to explain that to you. But we would love to
tell you more about that. Lastly, I'll just
ask you before we go, what has life been like
for you during the pandemic, and what have you missed most? I mean, you sort of
alluded to it with travel, just being out there
a little bit now. WALTER ISAACSON: You know,
humans are a social animal, as Aristotle said,
or maybe Plato. I can't remember. And I suffer that
trait, which is I love being around other people. I was pretty good
during the pandemic, but down here in New Orleans,
we went out with friends. We still had meals together. And we tried to
socially distance. We tried to eat outside
whenever possible. But I think that humans crave
interaction with other humans. That's what sparks creativity. And so during the pandemic
here in New Orleans, I tried to be as
good as you could be, but I really missed real human
interactions with my students at Tulane, with the
friends I went out with. And so I was glad Tulane
actually never sent kids home. It was always in person,
even though socially distanced and careful. All of my lectures are
now a YouTube playlist if anybody wants to look
at the lecture about how Larry and Sergey figured
out that a hot dog was not just the same as a warm puppy
when you're doing the search. That's in my book and in my
YouTube digital revolution Tulane lectures. But I also went to campus. I just wanted to
see the students. I was in the early
Pfizer vaccine trial, so I got a leg up
on being vaccinated, but being with other
people I think's important. And I can't wait for Google
to have its headquarters back open. LEIGH GALLAGHER: I
was just going to say, we'd love to have
you back in person. So-- WALTER ISAACSON: Well, I've
been there, both in the Valley and in New York, been
to the meetings there. And I can't wait to get back. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Great,
well, we'd love that. But Walter, I can't thank
you enough, we at Google can't thank you enough,
for spending time with us, for sharing your incredible
insights from your just incredible new book. And I encourage everyone
on the call to read it. And we wish you the best. So thank you so much. It's great to see
you again, too. WALTER ISAACSON:
By the way, Leigh, it was great to be
with you finally in person, having
read your book. And Google's very
lucky to have you. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Oh, well,
thank you for saying that. We're lucky to have you, too. Thanks again, Walter. WALTER ISAACSON: Bye bye. LEIGH GALLAGHER: Bye bye. [MUSIC PLAYING]
