It's about time

“Momento “ (mixed media), by Cambridge, Mass.-based George Shaw, in his show “Ad Tempus,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, May 7-30

He says:

"Time and its measure appears to be central to our understanding of ourselves and existence itself. It all comes down to ticking away the moments to living in the moment and owning it.

“Ultimately our search comes down to attempting to grasp this floating nonexisting thing, this moment. Once it's in hand it slips away in an instant to the past, growing further away and less true by the moment.

“We walk through the forest of our life trying to name and understand everything and in the end miss being present.

“It's been said that the artist functions to among other things to stop time, to commit moments to eternity that human nature made tangible, which on its face seems improbable.’’

“{My} work is an continuing attempt to stop time and explore the idea of the moment.

“{I} continue to use various mediums, combined with various materials including wood, metal and glass, to create my paintings and sculpture.’’

Chris Powell: The 'thin blue line' flag controversy; 3 unconstitutional bills

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Despite the criminal prosecution underway in Minneapolis for the wrongful death of George Floyd, police officers are far more sinned against than sinning and are crucial to decent society. So claims that a flag displayed to support them is racist are ridiculous.

The flag in question, the "thin blue line" flag, is a replica of the U.S. flag with a blue stripe superimposed across its middle. It is no more inherently racist than Black Lives Matter flags and posters. Yes, there are racist cops just as there are racists in the Black Lives Matter movement, and racists may use those flags and posters to solicit support. But the flags and posters have legitimate meaning and are not contaminated by occasional misuse.

These days making an accusation of racism is the quickest way to intimidate one's adversaries. Those who accuse the "thin blue line" flag of racism want to undermine support for all police officers. That must be rejected.

Nevertheless, it is just as well that South Windsor's (Conn.)Town Council failed other other week, on a tie vote, to pass a resolution authorizing the "thin blue line" flag to be flown on a town government flagpole in the center of town, as organizational and commemorative flags are authorized to fly there.

For there is a serious problem with the "thin blue line" flag: the Flag Code of the United States. The code is federal law and it says: "The flag should never have placed on it, or attached to it, any mark, insignia, letter, word, number, figure, or drawing of any kind."

That is, the flag always should be displayed exactly as it is.

While the code establishes protocol for the flag, no penalties can be imposed for violating it. It is trumped by the right of free expression guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Indeed, the Supreme Court has courageously ruled that people have a First Amendment right to burn or deface their own U.S. flags.

But people who love their country should treat the flag, the country's symbol, with respect. They might do well to note a part of the code that is routinely violated:

“The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, or printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard.”

While people have a right to disobey the flag code, a government flagpole should not be party to it. Surely South Windsor can find another way to show its appreciation for police officers and defend them against the anarchistic smears of racism.

xxx

THREE UNCONSTITUTIONAL BILLS: The First Amendment is not getting the respect it deserves from the Connecticut General Assembly. Several bills that violate the First Amendment have been introduced and are being taken too seriously.

One would prohibit the publication or broadcast of the identities of the victims of fatal accidents, as well as photos of fatal accidents, before a victim's family is notified. Such circumstances can be shocking, but then word of any untimely death is shocking, whether it comes from police or news organizations. The right to publish and broadcast public events can't be curtailed, and delays in police work can't be allowed to obstruct freedom of expression.

Another bill would block public access to housing court records while letting journalists see them. But journalism is first a constitutional right, not a profession, and anyone can be a journalist at any time. If a journalist has the right of access to public records, equal protection of the law requires that everyone have access.

A third bill would give state government the power to interfere with the ownership and finances of The Hartford Courant because the newspaper holds an antique state charter. But the charter did not give state government the authority to run the paper.

The pending acquisition of the newspaper chain that owns The Courant by a rapacious investment house may be a disaster for journalism nationally and in Connecticut, but then anyone else can make a better offer for the paper.

Legislators might do far more for journalism if they ever made sure that Connecticut students could read at a high school level and had some understanding of citizenship when they are given their diplomas.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.

Don't shy from it

Bust of an elderly Roman man (marble) 40 B.C.

“Wrinkles on a beloved’s face, the body after death, are mortal lessons. He who shrinks from their contemplation is like a dandy sniffing a vinegar-soaked hanky lest he catch the rank whiff of the poor.’’

— Richard Selzer (1928-2016) a Yale Medical School professor of surgery and celebrated writer, especially for his essays and memoirs

Richard Selzer

Get out of town

“Dreaming (detail) (acrylic and collage), by Carla Munsat, in her show “Escape,’’ through May 2 at Bromfield Gallery, Boston

The nine cities of Newport -- from 'beautiful' to 'nearly squalid'

The private Redwood Library and Athenaeum, in Newport

“I found— or thought I found — that Newport, Rhode Island, presented nine cities, some superimposed, some having very little relation with the others — variously beautiful, impressive, absurd, commonplace, and one very nearly squalid.’’

__ Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), American playwright and novelist, in his last novel, Theophilus North (1973), based on his time in “The City by the Sea’’ as a tutor in 1926

Lining it up

Digital image from 4” x 5” film negative by Shantell Martin (photo by Theo Coulumbe) in the show “NEW/NOW: Shantell Martin’’, at the New Britain (Conn.) Museum of American Art through April 18.
The museum says:

“One of the most versatile young artists working today, Shantell Martin is known for her exploration into the vast potential of the drawn line.’’

Llewellyn King: Alternative energy is disrupting world order

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Glance up and around and you’ll know the horizon is changing. From Canada to South Africa, Brazil to China, windmills and solar panels are telling a story of change.

In the United States, the landscape is collecting a kind of 21st-Century raiment. Wind farms, solar farms, and just stray windmills and solar panels on roofs are signaling something big and different.

When they were making Tom Jones in 1963, the very funny film based on Henry Fielding’s classic novel, the big problem was finding English villages that dated from the 18th Century and still looked it. The filmmakers found plenty of appropriate villages, but all the skylines were despoiled with television aerials. No filmmaker today can avoid windmills and solar panels, and computer graphics will have to come to the rescue for period dramas.

Alexander Mirtchev, a respected member of the Washington foreign-policy establishment and vice chairman of the Atlantic Council, in a new book based on a study he conducted for the Wilson Center, names this changed horizon for what it is: a megatrend. In doing this Mirtchev joins other megatrend energy spotters of the past, including environmentalist Amory Lovins and economist Daniel Yergin. Mirtchev’s book is titled The Prologue: The Alternative Energy Megatrend in the Age of Great Power Competition.

Energy has been shaping society and the relationship between nations since humans switched from burning wood to coal. The next step after that was the Industrial Revolution, ushering in what might be called “the first megatrend.”

Mirtchev builds on how energy supply changes relationships and looks to a future where the balance of power could be upended, and energy production could affect neighbors in new ways. For example, I have noted, the Irish are unhappy about British nuclear activity across the Irish Sea. There also is tension along the border between Austria and Slovakia: The Slovaks favor a nuclear future, and the Austrians are into wind and opposed to any nuclear power. As a result, windmills line the Austrian side of this central European border.

Mirtchev’s book is a serious work by a serious scholar that pulls together the impact of alternative energy on national security, the interplay between great powers, and the changing landscape between great powers and a few lesser ones. It is wonderfully free of the idealistic tropes about alternative energy as a morally superior force.

There also are changes within countries. Recently, I wrote about how Houston — the holy of holies of the oil industry — is seeking to rebrand the oil capital as a tech mecca as well as holding onto its oil and gas status as those decline.

If you look at the world, you can see how President Biden can stand up to Saudi Arabia in a way that other presidents couldn’t do. Saudi oil reserves don’t mean what they once did. They aren’t as essential to the future of the world as they once were. There is more oil around and the trend is away from oil. Historic coal exporters, such as Poland, Australia, South Africa and the United States, are losing their markets.

Other losses, including U.S. technological dominance in energy technology, are more subtle. For example, although jubilation over solar and wind is widely felt in the United States by environmentalists, it should be tempered by the fact that solar cells and wind turbines are being provided by China. China has seized manufacturing dominance in alternative energy, endangering national security for dependent countries.

Mirtchev’s arguments have found powerful endorsements. A number of big-name, international security thinkers have come forward to endorse the concept of a realignment caused by the megatrend of alternative energy. These range from Henry Kissinger to a who’s who of foreign-policy stalwarts here and in Europe.

James L. Jones, retired Marine general and President Obama’s national-security adviser, said, summing up thoughts expressed by a full panoply of experts, “ ‘The Prologue’ offers a valuable new framework for international strategic action.”

Retired Adm. James G. Stavridis, an executive of the Carlyle Group and other enterprises, said the book is “a masterpiece of original thought, and it should be must-reading in universities and war colleges.”

Who would have thought of the wind and sun as players in the rivalry between nations or that they would spearhead a megatrend?

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Wind turbines at Lempster Mountain, New Hampshire

Historic shots

“I now live in the town of Concord, Massachusetts, not far from the Old North Bridge, where the American Revolution began. Whenever I take visitors to see the monument, and stand before the marble shaft (above) reading that lovely inscription which commemorates ‘the shot heard round the world,’ I think privately of Bobby Thomson’s (below) home run.’’

From Doris Kearns Goodwin’s  (born 1943) Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir

Bobby Thomson (1923-2010) in 1951. The "Shot Heard 'Round the World" was a game-winning home run by New York Giants outfielder and third baseman Bobby Thomson off Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca at the Polo Grounds in New York City on Oct. 3, 1951, to win the National League pennant. Thomson's three-run homer came in the ninth inning of the third game of a three-game playoff for the pennant in which the Giants trailed, 4–1 entering the ninth, and 4–2 with two runners on base at the time of Thomson's at-bat.

'Ever-evolving landscapes'

From Jeesoo Lee’s show “Moving Scenery’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston June 2-June 27.

The gallery says:

“Through the process of layering, cutting, and reattaching materials, Lee combines passing moments in time and the physical spaces in which they have occurred. Her solo exhibition captures the fleetingness of memory. Lee weaves poignant recollections such as ‘the sound of a young son’s laughter when he opens his eyes in the morning’ or ‘the anguish of a friend who has unexpectedly lost a loved one’. The work portrays these moments, both the intense and the mundane, to combine and form ever-evolving landscapes. Her work is based on psychological states of being which are then redefined through the physicality of her material.’’

'In the horizon of my mind'

Packed in my mind lie all the clothes

⁠Which outward nature wears,

And in its fashion's hourly change

⁠It all things else repairs.

In vain I look for change abroad,

⁠And can no difference find,

Till some new ray of peace uncalled

⁠Illumes my inmost mind.

What is it gilds the trees and clouds,

⁠And paints the heavens so gay,

But yonder fast-abiding light

⁠With its unchanging ray?

Lo, when the sun streams through the wood,

⁠Upon a winter's morn,

Where'er his silent beams intrude

⁠The murky night is gone.

How could the patient pine have known

⁠The morning breeze would come,

Or humble flowers anticipate

⁠The insect's noonday hum,—

Till the new light with morning cheer

⁠From far streamed through the aisles,

And nimbly told the forest trees

⁠For many stretching miles?

I've heard within my inmost soul

⁠Such cheerful morning news,

In the horizon of my mind

⁠Have seen such orient hues,

As in the twilight of the dawn,

⁠When the first birds awake,

Are heard within some silent wood,

⁠Where they the small twigs break,

Or in the eastern skies are seen,

⁠Before the sun appears,

The harbingers of summer heats

⁠Which from afar he bears.

— “The Inward Morning,’’ by Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Robert P. Alvarez: Ga. voter law is an attack on my Catholic faith.

Outcome of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, with blue signifying areas (especially cities) that voted for Biden and red for Trump

—Graphic by AdamG2016

Via OtherWords.org

I believe in God and in the right to vote. Georgia’s recent election bill doesn’t just feel like an attack on democracy — it feels like an attack on my faith.

The bill, formally SB 202, infamously makes it illegal to give people food or water while they’re waiting in line to cast their ballot. Providing food for the hungry and water for the thirsty are tenets of my Catholic faith.

So is standing with the marginalized. People don’t like to bring race into the conversation, but we have to be honest about how this bill harms people of color.

In Georgia neighborhoods that were 90 percent or more white, the average wait time to vote was around five minutes in last year’s elections. For neighborhoods that were 90 percent or more people of color, the wait time was about an hour. Some voters waited up to 11 hours.

Georgia’s new law seems designed to make these lines longer — and to punish anyone who tries to make them more comfortable. This disproportionate impact on Black, Latino, Native, and Asian communities isn’t an accident. It’s the result of public policy.

Long lines make people less likely to vote in future elections. Republicans know this. That’s why these long lines are concentrated in areas where voters are more likely to cast their ballots for Democrats.

For many voters of color, the ballot box is how we advocate for our needs — and how we defend ourselves against legislation that might harm us. Make no mistake, this bill is about silencing voters of color and chipping away at our political power.

The new law also chops the period of time when voters can request an absentee ballot in half, imposes stricter voter ID requirements for mail-in voting, and slashes the number of locations where voters can cast a ballot.

More worryingly still, it strips control of the state’s election board from Georgia’s secretary of state — and gifts it instead to the Republican-controlled state legislature.

Last year, Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger refused President Trump’s calls to “find” 11,000 more votes for the president, who lost the state. Now, by giving themselves power over the board, Georgia Republicans are plainly laying the groundwork to decertify any future election results they don’t like.

The GOP used to shout their commitment to religious freedom, the rights of businesses, and freedom of speech from rooftops. Now, with their wide net of voter suppression drawing the condemnation of faith groups as well as businesses, they’re stumbling over their own hypocrisy. When Georgia-based businesses like Coca-Cola and Delta spoke out against these new laws, Republicans tried to raise their taxes.

To top it all off, Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are now telling businesses to “stay out of politics.”

That’s rich coming from McConnell, a lifelong defender of corporate “speech” whose super PAC took in an unbelievable $475 million from corporations last year alone. It’s like if businesses do anything other than write checks, Republicans cry “cancel culture.” Give me a break.

GOP lawmakers are pushing hundreds of bills like Georgia’s in nearly every state in the country. These coordinated attacks on voting rights will inevitably leave poor people and people of color vulnerable to harmful public policy.

As a Catholic, I’m deeply offended by this assault on our democracy. No matter what your faith is, you should be, too.

Robert P. Alvarez is a media relations associate at the Institute for Policy Studies.

'Equal to the sky'

Post Office Square in Boston’s Financial District

“To paint one rose equals a life in that place

and on the thorny path outside

one cathedral is equal to the sky.’’

— “Goodbye Post Office Square,’’ by Boston-based poet Fanny Howe

Time servers and devoted teachers

Providence’s Classical High School

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The endless standoff between the Providence Teachers Union and would-be reformers in state government reminds me again of why I don’t like public-employee unions. They become political organizations and rigid economic- interest groups, rife with conflicts of interest involving elected officials (to whom they can give or withhold campaign cash).  That isn’t to say that teachers shouldn’t have rigorous Civil Service-style protections.

For some reason, the latest standoff reminds me of when I sat right behind two Providence teachers on a train coming back from New York 30 years ago. All that the duo, who looked about 40 years old,  talked about were their pensions. Of course, there are many devoted teachers in the Providence public schools (which my kids attended) but also too many time servers like my fellow passengers that day.

Early Boston art

A silver porringer created by Boston silversmith John Coney, c. 1710

“Some want to rob the Puritans of art….There were ten silversmiths in Boston before there was a single lawyer. People forget all those things.’’

— Robert Frost in his commencement address “What Became of New England’’ at Oberlin College in 1937.

After looking deep inside

“Self-Portrait (BC Series)’’ (watercolor on Arches paper), by Hannah Wilke (1940-1993), through April 10, at the LaiSun Keane Gallery, Boston.

The ecological empires of oaks, Charter and otherwise

Large white oak

 Adapted From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

That Southern New England has so many kinds of trees helps explain much of its ecological richness. Oaks are among the most common. I always thought of them as rather boring, especially because their leaves turn blandly brown in the fall and tend to hang on until spring. (I do have fond memories from childhood of tree houses in them and acorn fights.) But Douglas W. Tallamy, an entomologist at the University of Delaware, talks up oaks in his new book, The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees.

Mr. Tallamy explains how oaks support more life-forms than any other North American tree genus. They provide food (especially acorns and caterpillars) and protection for birds, mammals (consider squirrels,  racoons, bears and bats), insects and spiders, as well as enriching soil, holding rainwater and cleaning the air. And they can live for hundreds of years.

“There is much going on in your yard that would not be going on if you did not have one or more oak trees gracing your piece of planet earth,” he writes in the book, which shows us what’s happening within, on, under, and around these trees.

Mr. Tallamy offers advice about how to plant and care for  oaks, and information about the best oak species for your area.

Hug your oak trees and/or plant some. (And if they get uprooted in a storm, they make about the best firewood.) Fewer lawns, more oak trees, please. Now that it’s April, those remaining ugly brown leaves from last year will soon be pushed out and we’ll soon be enjoying the shade under oaks’ expansive canopies.

“The Charter Oak” (oil on canvas), by Charles De Wolf Brownell, 1857. It’s at the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford.

The Charter Oak was an unusually large white oak tree in Hartford. It grew from the 12th or 13th century until it fell during a storm in 1856. According to tradition, Connecticut's Royal Charter of 1662 was hidden within the hollow of the tree to thwart its confiscation by the English governor-general. The oak became a symbol of American independence and is commemorated on the Connecticut State Quarter.

Photos of acorns by David Hill

'Doorway to the sea'

“Christina’s World,’’ by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), the very popular American “realist “ painter. The woman in the painting, Anna Christina Olson (1893-1968), had a degenerative muscular disorder that prevented her from walking after she was 30. She refused to use a wheelchair, so she would crawl. The house and barn are in Cushing, Maine, where the Wyeth family had a summer house.

“The world of New England is in that house – spidery, like crackling skeletons rotting in the attic – dry bones. It’s like a tombstone to sailors lost at sea, the Olson ancestor who fell from the yardarm of a square-rigger and was never found. It’s the doorway of the sea to me, of mussels and clams and sea monsters and whales.’’

-- Painter Andrew Wyeth, on the home of his model Christina Olson, in Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life (1996), by Richard Meryman

The Olson House in 1995. The house and its occupants, Christina and Alvaro Olson, were depicted in paintings and sketches by Wyeth from 1939 to 1968. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in June 2011. The Farnsworth Art Museum, in Rockland, Maine, owns the house, which is open to the public.

From 'the inner world'

Burdock, originally from Eurasia, and an invasive weed in North America.

“In the April sun that doesn’t yet smell, brown and red birds declaring hunger,

I appear from the inner world — a hell of beetles and voles — appointed to multiply.’’

— From “Burdock,’’ by Carol Frost (born 1948), Massachusetts-born American poet.

At the Cape Ann Museum, honoring a pioneer in promoting equality for women

John Singleton Copley’s (1738–1815) “Portrait of Mrs. John Stevens” (Judith Sargent, later Mrs. John Murray) (oil on canvas), in the show “Our Souls Are by Nature Equal to Yours: The Legacy of Judith Sargent Murray, through May 2 at the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Mass. This is via the Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Art Acquisition Endowment Fund. Photography ©Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago. This portrait was painted in 1770-1772.

The Cape Ann Museum says:

The show is a collaboration by Cape Ann Museum, the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Sargent House Museum, in Gloucester, to celebrate the Sargent House Museum's 100th anniversary. This exhibit is focused on the life and achievements of Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), a Gloucester native and civil-rights advocate. While her brothers were tutored in preparation for college, she educated herself and began writing essays, poems and letters.

Her most famous work, On the Equality of the Sexes, argued that men and women experienced the same world, and therefore deserved the same rights. This essay was first published in 1790, a time when women's rights as a political topic was practically unheard of. Murray also wrote about such other topics as education, politics, theology and money. Her outspoken writing paved the way for future advocates of women's rights.

David Warsh: From eugenics to molecular biology

Representation of the now famous “Double Helix’’: Two complementary regions of nucleic acid molecules will bind and form a double helical structure held together by base pairs.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

It was so long ago that I can no longer remember with any precision the pathways along which the book started me towards economic journalism. What I know with certainty is that The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (Athenaeum), by James Watson, changed my life when I read it, not long after it was first published, in 1968. Watson’s intimate account of his and Francis Crick’s race with Linus Pauling in 1953 to solve the structure of the molecule at the center of hereditary transmission was thrilling in all its particulars. I went into college one way and came out another, with a durable side-interest in molecular biology.

Thus when Horace Freeland Judson’s The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Modern Biology (Simon and Schuster), came along, in 1979, I marveled at Judson’s much more expansive collective portrait of the age. And when Lily Kay’s The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology (Oxford) came out in, in 1993, I was quite taken by the institutional background it supplied.

Kay told the story of how the mathematician Warren Weaver in the 1930s decisively backed the Rockefeller Foundation away from its ill-considered funding  backing of the fringes of the eugenics movement – human engineering through controlled breeding – by initiating “a concerted physiochemical attack on [discovering the nature of] the gene… at the moment in history when it became unacceptable to advocate social control based on crude eugenic principles and outmoded racial theories.”

Not until 1938 would Weaver describe his campaign as “molecular biology.” In the dozen years after 1953, Nobel prizes were awarded to 18 scientists for investigation of the nature of the gene, all but one of them funded by the Rockefeller Foundation under Weaver’s direction.

For the past couple of weeks I have been reading Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (Simon & Schuster, 2021), by Walter Isaacson. Doudna, you may remember (pronounced Dowd-na), shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last autumn with collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier “for the development of a method of genetic editing” known as the CRISPR/Cas 9 genetic scissors. The COVID pandemic prevented the journeys to Stockholm that laureates customary make to deliver lectures and accept prizes. Medalists will be recognized at some later date.  At that point, expect the significance of the new code-editing technologies to be emphasized. The new know-how recognized in 2020 Prize in Chemistry is probably the most important breakthrough since the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Crick, Watson and Maurice Wilkins, in 1962. Instead of the sterilization and other forceful measures envisaged by the eugenics movement, CRISPR promises to gradually eliminate hereditary disease.

Three themes emerge from Code Breaker.  The first is how much has changed with respect to gender, in biological science at least. X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin died in 1958, four years before she might have shared the prize. (Dead persons are not eligible for the award.) She was cruelly disparaged in Watson’s book, despite the fact that her photographs were crucial to the discovery of the helical structure of the gene.

Opportunities for female scientists had begun to open up by the time that The Eighth Day was published, but women hadn’t yet reached levels of professional accomplishment such that their photographs would appear except rarely in pages dominated by White males. Doudna, born in 1964, and Charpentier, born in 1968, encountered abundant opportunities.

A second theme, less stressed, underscores the extent to which the tables have turned over the last century with respect to the importance attached by scientists to race.  Strongly held view about the dispersion of genetic endowments across various populations are nothing new, but, as The New York Times put it a couple of years ago, “It has been more than a decade since James D. Watson, a founder of modern genetics, landed in a kind of professional exile by suggesting that black people are intrinsically less intelligent than whites.”

A third theme, the main story, is Doudna’s decision, as a graduate student in the 1990s, to study the less-celebrated RNA molecule that performs work by copying DNA-coded information in order to build proteins in cells.  All this is clearly explained in Isaacson’s book, in relatively short chapters and sub-sections. The effect of this mosaic technique is to briskly move the story along.

After many twists and turns, Doudna and Charpentier showed in June 2012 that “clustered regularly interspersed palindromic repeats” (hence the easy-to-remember-and- pronounce acronym CRISPR), “Cas9” being a particular associated enzyme that did the cutting work, could be made to cut and replace fragments of genes work in a test tube. Within six months, five different papers appeared showing that such scissors would also work in live animal cells.

The famed Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in Cambridge, where much important biomedical and genomic research is conducted.

An epic patent battle ensued, involving claims to various ways in which CRISPR systems could be used in different sorts of kinds of organisms.  A nearly metaphysical argument developed: Once Doudna and Charpentier demonstrated that the technique would work on bacteria, was it “obvious” that it would work in human cells?   Rival claimants included  Doudna, of the University of California at Berkeley; Charpentier, of Umeå University, Sweden; geneticist George Church, of the Harvard Medical School; and molecular biologist Feng Zhang, of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Church and Zhang are colorful characters with powerful minds and different scientific backgrounds. Their complicated competition with Doudna and Charpentier is said to reprise the race of Watson and Crick with Pauling forty years before. Well-disposed toward all four principals, author Isaacson spends a fair amount of effort interpreting their rival claims.  At the end of the book, he expresses the hope that Zhang and Church might one day share a Nobel Prize in Medicine for their CRISPR work.

If there is a better all-around English-language journalist of the last fifty years than Isaacson, I don’t know who that might be. Born in 1952, he grew up in New Orleans, went to Harvard College and then Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, before beginning newspaper work. He joined Time magazine as a political reporter in 1978; by 1996 he was its editor. To that point he had written two books (the first with Evan Thomas):  The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made; (1986); and Kissinger: A Biography (1992).

In 2001 Isaacson left Time to serve as CEO of CNN. Eighteen months later he was named president of the Aspen Institute.  There followed, among other books, biographies of Benjamin Franklin (2003), Albert Einstein (2007), Steve Jobs (2011) and Leonardo da Vinci (2017). He resigned from the Aspen Institute in 2017 to become a professor of American History and Values at Tulane University.

As editor of Time, Isaacson took a call in 2000 from Vice President Al Gore, asking on behalf of President Clinton that the visage of National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins be added to that of biotech entrepreneur J. Craig Venter on the cover of a forthcoming issue.  A crash program to sequence the human genome was threatening to break apart after the abrasive Venter devised a cheaper means and formed a private company.

Isaacson consulted his sources, including Broad Institute president Eric Lander, a friend from Rhodes Scholar days, and complied. Science journalist Nicholas Wade wrote the story. At least since then, Isaacson has been involved at the highest levels in the story of molecular biology.  He is uniquely well-qualified to describe the most recent segment of its arc, and, in the second half of the book, to lay out the many thorny social choices that lie ahead.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first ran. © 2021 DAVID WARSH, PROPRIETOR

Walter Isaacson