Walter Isaacson is writing a book about CRISPR. He’s got company

The six letters that forever changed science will soon be the subject of thousands of words as a burst of new books on CRISPR genome editing make their way toward a retailer near you.

One, from famed biographer Walter Isaacson, promises a sweeping narrative that goes from that double helix discovery to those CRISPR’d kids in China. Another will pick apart the potential of eradicating infectious diseases, while a third aims to make the underlying science understandable, and yet another asks whether any of this playing God business is ethically sound.

It’s a crowded field, but one free of competitive acrimony. While the laboratories behind the genome-editing technology have , the corresponding book writers have