This program is sponsored by the Covley Foundation based in Los Angeles, California.

The Covley Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear and Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

There's a scene in my book that I find was so powerful when I heard about it from Jennifer

Dowd.

After she invented this technology of using CRISPR to edit our genes, she has a nightmare.

And in the nightmare, somebody says we want to introduce you to a person who wants to understand

this technology.

She went into the room and the person looks up and it's Adolf Hitler.

And she recoils and has trouble sleeping after that for night after night.

And that's when, and in the book, I describe this, she embarks on a journey to try to figure

out how do you enlist the support of people around the world to understand the technology

and then figure out what are we comfortable using it to do.

It's Walter Isaacson, whose latest book is called The Codebreaker.

It's a profile of Jennifer Dowdner, the Nobel Prize winning co-inventor of the gene editing

tool CRISPR.

Walter Isaacson loves to write about people who are not only brilliant and creative, but

who also change the world.

People like Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs.

He also loves to tell stories.

And his new book has a blockbuster story about the remarkable scientific breakthrough of

CRISPR and the people who race to be the first to create it.

...