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+--- Thread: Hilo High Grad Jennifer Doudna, The Code Breaker (/showthread.php?tid=22211)
Hilo High Grad Jennifer Doudna, The Code Breaker - HereOnThePrimalEdge - 03-08-2021
The Code Breaker, a biography exploring the life of recent Nobel Prize winner and Hilo High graduate Jennifer Doudna is getting good reviews:
... the story starts with Doudna’s childhood adventures throughout her home on the big Hawaiian island Hilo. A little girl who never quite fit in, Doudna found solace in good books — particularly James Watson’s “The Double Helix,” detailing his discovery of the structure of DNA.
Jennifer Doudna led her lab to be one that is based on collaboration and cooperation across disciplines, and this was how she prepared herself to face Covid-19. To celebrate her contributions in combating Covid-19 and her ground breaking gene edition research, Doudna — along with her 2012 partner Emmanuelle Charpentier — won the 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Walter Isaacson, with his decades of celebrated experience, documented Doudna’s life and work beautifully.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/2/20/the-code-breaker-walter-isaacson-review-biography/
NY Times review:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/books/review/walter-isaacson-the-code-breaker.html
Some background on Jennifer Doudna:
It was as a young girl living in Hawai’i that Doudna first became acquainted with the joy of scientific discovery. She grew up on the Big Island, where her father taught American literature at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo; her mother was a history lecturer. Doudna took long hikes in the tropical forests, spotting plants and animals, and prowled the beaches for shells. Don Hemmes, a family friend and biologist at the university, invited her to his lab for a summer of studying worms and mushrooms. Another summer, she learned how to use an electron microscope, an instrument that later became indispensable for her explorations of molecular structures.
“In high school I realized I loved math and loved chemistry,” she recalls. Junior year, she attended a program at a Honolulu cancer center and heard a lecture given by a young woman with long blonde hair. Doudna was mesmerized by the topic—why cells become cancerous—but was also struck “that this feminine person was clearly an incredible scientist. It was an important moment.”
https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/winter-2014-gender-assumptions/cracking-code-jennifer-doudna-and-her-amazing
RE: Hilo High Grad Jennifer Doudna, The Code Breaker - Carey - 03-09-2021
We went to her UH-Hilo talk in Sept, 2018!
She was one of the most accessible scientist to lecture in the Distinguished Lecture series!
https://hilo.hawaii.edu/blog/chancellor/2018/09/19/jennifer-doudna/
So great that her work on CRISPR has helped humanity in such a vital way!
RE: Hilo High Grad Jennifer Doudna, The Code Breaker - AaronM - 08-07-2021
Now there is a musical about her!
https://www.kalw.org/arts-culture/2021-08-03/work-summer-high-school-musical-teacher
RE: Hilo High Grad Jennifer Doudna, The Code Breaker - HereOnThePrimalEdge - 08-15-2022
Wonderful article about Hilo High graduate Jennifer Doudna, and her ongoing research. Inspiring! She talks about science, ethics, medicine, and East Hawaii:
I grew up in Hawaii, and for me, the ocean has always represented an incredible source of inspiration and beauty but also great risk. I think about science in the same way. There’s so much out there we don’t know, and so many interesting ideas to pursue, but there’s also risk. There’s the mundane risk of maybe my experiment won’t work, but also the more profound risk of will I actually do something interesting with my life? Is this going to be an interesting way for me to contribute to the world?
A Crack in Creation,” published in 2017, opens with her retelling of a dream she had in 2015 in which she watches as a tsunami approaches the shore near where she grew up in Hawaii. In her dream, Doudna was able to surf to safety.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/15/magazine/jennifer-doudna-crispr-interview.html
"...will I actually do something interesting with my life?"