Walter Isaacson

Jennifer Doudna, the gene editing pioneer who helps discover CRISPR, gene editing tool, which my book, The Codebreaker, she grew up feeling like a misfit.

In Hawaii, in a Polynesian village, being the only white person, and also trying to live up to a father who pushed her.

So if people can read the books...

And I should have said about Jennifer Dowden, my point was that she was told by her school guidance counselor, no, girls don't do science.

You know, science is not for girls.

You're not going to do math or science.

And so it pushes her to say, all right, I'm going to do math and science.

Right.

And I'm talking about when Jennifer Doudna was young and she felt really, really out of place.

Like you and me and a lot of people when they feel in that way, they read books.

They curl up with a book.

So her father drops a book on her bed called The Double Helix, the book by James Watson on the discovery of the structure of DNA by him and Rosalind Franklin and Francis Crick.

And

She realizes, oh my God, girls can become scientists.

My school guidance counselor's wrong.

So I think books, like she read this book, and even if it's a comic book, like Elon Musk read,

Books can sometimes inspire you.

And every one of my books is about people who are totally innovative, who weren't just smart, because none of us are going to be able to match Einstein in mental processing power.

But we can be as curious as he was and creative and think out of the box the way he did.

Or Steve Jobs put it, think different.