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

01

The Gene: An Intimate History

Siddhartha Mukherjee · Science

The Gene is Siddhartha Mukherjee's account of the gene — what it is, how it was discovered, and what humanity has done and might yet do with that knowledge.

A kindred science read.

02

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg · Science

A Crack in Creation is Jennifer Doudna and Samuel Sternberg's account of how CRISPR-Cas9 works, what it can do, and why its possibilities should give everyone pause.

Shares gene editing and crispr with The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race.

03

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee · Science

The Emperor of All Maladies is Siddhartha Mukherjee's account of cancer from antiquity to the present — its biology, its treatments, its false dawns, and the scientists and patients caught in the middle of each.

A kindred science read.

04

The Double Helix

James D. Watson · Science

The Double Helix is James Watson's account of the race to determine the structure of DNA, which he and Francis Crick solved in 1953 at Cambridge.

Both dig into scientific competition.

05

Einstein: His Life and Universe

Walter Isaacson · Biography

Walter Isaacson's Einstein biography is the most widely read account of the physicist's life in English, written after Isaacson was granted access to forty thousand previously sealed documents in the Hebrew University Einstein Archives.

A kindred science read.

06

Lab Girl

Hope Jahren · Memoir

Lab Girl is Hope Jahren's memoir of becoming a scientist, told alongside a parallel account of plant biology that is one of the most original structural decisions in recent nonfiction.

Both dig into women in science.

07

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking · Science

A Brief History of Time is Stephen Hawking's attempt to explain the biggest questions in physics — where the universe came from, how it behaves, and where it might be going — to readers with no scientific training.

A kindred science read.

08

A Pattern Language

Christopher Alexander · Science

A Pattern Language is an extraordinary attempt to describe, in systematic form, the conditions that make human habitats feel alive.

A kindred science read.

09

A Philosophy of Software Design

John Ousterhout · Science

John Ousterhout's central claim in this book is that the greatest limitation in software development is our ability to manage complexity, and that almost every problem in large systems can be traced back to complexity that was unnecessary and could have been prevented.

A kindred science read.

10

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson · Science

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's attempt to understand the scientific story of everything — from the Big Bang to the emergence of modern humans — by spending three years talking to scientists and reading science history.

A kindred science read.

11

A Universe from Nothing

Lawrence M. Krauss · Science

A Universe from Nothing is Lawrence Krauss's argument that modern physics has resolved, or at least reframed, the ancient philosophical question of why there is something rather than nothing.

A kindred science read.

12

A World Without Ice

Henry Pollack · Science

Henry Pollack is a geophysicist at the University of Michigan who spent decades studying the Earth's heat flow and was a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

A kindred science read.