The Expendables by Jeff Rubin

The interesting thing was how it genuinely started from nuclear energy.

This is a book about some of the most competitive people in science. It’s a joint biography of Jennifer Doudna (who in 2020 won the Nobel prize together with Emanuelle Charpentier) and the CRISPR method for gene editing. The former is significantly less interesting than the latter. Isaacson does his best to wring a few drops of controversy or adversity out of Doudna’s life, but despite growing up white in Hawaii, she seems to have led a rather nice middle-class existence with nice supportive parents. Prior to reading the book, I thought CRISPR (“Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”) was…

The book is not high literature and contains no poetry or rhapsody on the beauty of earth or nature. It is a good practical survey of the climate change problem, paired with an array of plausible technology solutions, very much written by an engineer.  I liked the way Gates methodically dissected the planet’s use of energy: “How We Plug In, Make Things, Grow Things, Get Around, Keep Cool and Stay Warm”. I also admired Bill’s pragmatic approach: he does not particularly advocate for lower personal consumption, but recognizes that higher consumption is the means to which most of the planet…